What kind of animals are we?

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Coming to Australian TV this year is the British hit, Googlebox.

I wondered what it was, so I Googled Googlebox.

Reality TV of people watching TV.
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I mean...... like... WTF!

And it was a smash hit in the UK?

Reality TV has filled our screens with just so much crap, and now we want to watch ourselves watching TV?

It has made me wonder, just what kind of animal are we, that we'll immerse ourselves in such... rubbish?

I'm dumbfounded.

For the longest time, I suspected that TV was getting more boring every year because they've already done everything. As the Ecclesiastes writer says, there's nothing new under the sun. Now we're so bereft of imagination, we have to watch a show about watching a show. People have taken Seinfeld's idea, a show about nothing, and gone to new levels of nothing.

Gobsmacked... and even more so with it's reported popularity.

Just what kind of animals are we?

Sheeple.

Or maybe highly-evolved poo-flinging monkeys that know how to set things on fire.

In the UK, GoggleBox is considered pretty much the lowest of the low; as well as the people who watch it. The sort of people who only watch this sort of stuff, awful "reality" shows; X-Factor, something horrendous called "The Only Way is Essex" and "Geordie Shore" . . . trash TV that requires no intelligence or brain cells., along with "Comedy" which is character catchphrase-based.

There is a cultural divide between those who watch these things and those who don't - those that don't look down on those that do, while watching intelligently written Drama, thought-provoking and educational Documentaries. Those that do watch these things don't realise that they're stupid and that others are judging them based on the shite they watch.

Unfortunately, the hairless kind that doesn't prosper in extreme cold.

I'm a Harbor Seal.

Eukaryotes

We are apes!

Females are cats.

Males are dogs.

Most people have emigrated online leaving commercial television subsisting on an audience that can't or won't do that.

Homo sapiens means wise man. Our ability to reason is what separates us from other animals.

I saw it advertised again and realized my mistake. Gogglebox, not Googlebox. oops.

As for our ability to reason..... a TV show about people watching TV?

Humans are extremely sexualized, and in general, social empathic animals that require human flesh and blood contact to have a BASIC semblance of REAL comfort in life, overall.

Obviously, there are psychopathic leaning exceptions. One can even see that among Bonobos, the other innately peaceful loving ape cousin to human beings.

Humans have a mirror neuron system that is capable of providing this innate comfort by watching others gaining comfort, as a natural instinctual way of learning greater social cognition skills, per the most important type of evolutionary intelligence required for basic subsistence survival in social cooperation, as is the case for any healthy living social animal, on the planet earth, as is, now.

Yes, this can be hard to understand for folks who do not gain any significant benefit from this type of oxytocin social bonding comfort in flesh and blood human connections; however, for folks who do and innately understand it is the way to true social animal homeostasis (happiness or however one terms it) as evolved, still as is, the virtual reality of someone else's comfort to FEEL VICARIOUSLY THROUGH the Human Mirror neuron system when functioning correctly is a hell of a lot better than no human flesh and blood connection at all, either in REAL LIFE, OR VIRTUALLY AS SUCH, through vicarious mirror neuron ways of GETTING THIS MOST BASIC OF ALL HUMAN NEEDS FOR COMFORT, met, PER the oxytocin type of 'WARM AND FUZZIES'.

I'VE LIVED life both ways, and yes, those are the folks who are truly happy in life, as far as I can see, from almost every experience in my life, for one, so far.

And working with the general public and the military for over two decades in direct and almost constant interaction with TENS OF THOUSANDS OF FOLKS, MY CASE STUDIES ARE ALMOST UNLIMITED, IN REAL life, as such.

But I for one find my connections in REAL LIFE, now, BY GETTING OUT THERE AND CONNECTING TO FLESH AND BLOOD FOLKS.

OTHERS take the other option, per virtual reality, for any number OF reasons, AS A RESULT OF social isolation in REAL LIFE FLESH AND BLOOD CONNECTIONS.

And others have no idea what they are even MISSING, AS SADLY AS THAT part of the human condition can be.

And as science now shows, when children are raised by electronics instead of comforted by the breast as metaphor, they simply never grow a 'heart and soul', which is basically just a metaphor for the social bonding thingy, oxytocin, and etc. of FULL HUMAN BEING 1O1 aka LOVE and HUMAN EMPATHY, in some human circles.

BUT AGAIN, been there and done both places, so I KNOW, feel, AND REMEMBER WHAT IT WAS LIKE not to FEEL 'IT', too.

And for one who doesn't, AND NEVER HAS, all these words might as well be meaningless GIBBERISH, for one who is looking in from the other side of the mirror, of potential full humanity, as metaphor.

AND THAT'S okay too, as that too, is part of the human condition, light and dark, as is.

And to be clear I am NOT DIRECTING THIS OPINION AT anyone personally in this conversation, it is simply in response to the OP, and no thing else.