This is interesting. There are a lot of messages being sent to us that people are unable or unwilling to hear. But there are also messages being sent that people want hear.
Some coworkers were talking (loudly and near my desk) about how much they loved the show Storage Wars and I started thinking about why reality TV is so popular. Aside from the fact they are relatively cheap to produce and people have been trained to gobble them up, they must be sending a message that people want to hear.
That message is a simple one: you can apply a narrative to life. Reality can be dramatized. The more mundane and commonplace the lives depicted on these shows, the more we are encouraged to creative a narrative for our own lives. Sure it takes a bit of creative editing- snip little bits here and there, give more weight to this or that, re-order a few events and ta-da! You’ve created the story of your life.
The problem is that given how prone to self-delusion people are, the narrative they create for themselves rarely resembles the reality they live in.
