Whose life are you living for?

Have you ever wondered, as you sit in front of the wide-screen television watching your favourite soap opera (martial arts, legal drama, forensic, the ever-popular police force or whichever it may be) what it actually does to your brain and emotions?

We've all had that experience of being deeply affected by a movie. Bambi's mother, Forrest Gump...the emotional effects of a touching film moment can be as real as our own experiences. Except that it's contrived so; to tweak your emotions, to squeeze your heart. Doesn't that feel rather manipulative to you?

I mean, don't we have enough from daily life to deal with already?

Perhaps we don't. The figures on the screen, the actors with their well-rehearsed lines, are everything and do everything that we wish we could. We live voraciously through them: how could she do that? That's so stupid! He's so evil....

A study showed that the number of hospital admissions for paracetamol overdose in Britain increased after a showing of television drama Casualty depicted a man trying to kill himself by swallowing 50 paracetamol tablets. Some patients did admit to the show influencing their choice of drug in attempting suicide. It's scary to think how vulnerable we are, how easily influenced not just by encounters with real people, but with stories dreamt up by Hollywood scriptwriters.

I wonder if we were meant to live like this. Anesthesized to the real world, glued to our tv screens and internet browsers and games, seeking the next exciting thing. Reminds me of the wife (Mildred Montag, SparkNotes informs me) in Fahrenheit 451, glued to the tv and only a shell of a human being.

I am glued to the computer most of my waking hours, but sometimes it does pay to remember that people lived perfectly happy lives before technology or instant entertainment, and in some parts of the world they still do. I want to breathe non air-conditioned air, to close an internet window and open a real one, to laugh with a friend, to play a board game. Sometimes. There are still things that technology cannot give us.

And if that does not make my life primetime TV, so be it. My life and fate and relationships are not in the hands of a talented scriptwriter or the fancy of the audience, but my own. And that is worth it.