Walking through any checkout lane in a supermarket or store, you’ll find them there. You know, the magazines telling you about the most recent celebrity couple or break-up, and/or which actor or singer is dieting with the most recent fad. Suffering through the celebrity “dirt” segments on the radio to listen to a favorite song is becoming all the more tedious with the reports of certain celebs being sighted on vacation or ‘revealing’ their dream date, if they’re having a kid, or promoting their newest movie/single/etc. that they don’t actually tell you that much about. Truthfully, I think we as a society are becoming too obsessed with what celebrities are up to.

Now, don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying you shouldn’t be allowed to have a favorite celebrity actor or singer or the like; in fact, anyone who’s known me longer than 24 hours can confirm that I’ve probably mentioned Ariana Grande to them at some point, often without a conversational precedent. But I also think there’s a big difference in getting updates from a singer’s tour/movie release and being so obsessed with a celebrity that you, for example, get a tattoo of Kylie Jenner’s entire lip kit on your person.

And the reality is, it’s becoming increasingly harder to evade the pop culture news. Celebrity updates are ingrained in our radio stations, our TV channels, and especially social media, and many times they’re being reported as doing mundane things out in the public eye. Yet despite the triviality of the information we are fed by these outlets, there is nearly always more where it came from. When a celebrity is out in public, it is almost always treated as a ‘sighting’, as if the reporters are on some type of snapshot safari taking pictures of rare animals. Celebrities are ‘spotted’ at places like coffee shops or going shopping or spending time at the beach – everyday activities that are hardly even newsworthy. And if that’s not enough, it’s the amount of times that these things are reported that is becoming overbearing: for instance, I could probably tell you more about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s recent split than I’d care to. The line between celebrity news and politics has even been blurred by a reality TV host-turned-Republican presidential nominee – and it’s only going to be blurrier. Amongst the chatter about the current election, I hear people on a daily basis mention Kanye West’s alleged run for president in 2020.

I worry about the ‘info’ we’re told we ‘need to hear’ about celebs when in truth it has little effect on our lives. I worry about the people that are so busy ‘Keeping Up With the Kardashians’ that they have little else to talk about. And I worry about the level of seriousness the media treats celeb news with when they’re just experiencing life events that we’d consider ordinary, and that we’d get sick of hearing about if they weren’t celebs (i.e. relationships, having kids, getting morning coffee). Just because we hear ‘scandals’ such as our favorite celebs getting caught licking a donut without paying for it, does that mean we should hear about it for weeks on end?