The Effect of Pop Culture on Happiness

Students and recent college grads have a lot to think about, even without figuring out how to turn our interests into a career. Our brains spend all day in a state of hyper-activity - desires, cravings, longings, and random thoughts flood our consciousness. Not to mention that we're bombarded by outside stimuli like advertising, music, and conversation. No wonder we're all so scatter-brained. With all this intermixing of others' thoughts on top of our own, it's easy to feel a bit lost and misguided. What particularly bombards and overwhelms me is the multitude of messages targeted at young people ages 18-25, and what we "should" be thinking about. If you tune into MTV (which I do way too often), it won't take you long to realize that their programming tells you to seek popularity, beauty, and relationships, disregarding such values as intelligence, curiosity, and creativity. So my question is, where do our minds spend the most time at our age, and is it worth it? I'd say I spend about 35% of my day daydreaming about social stuff - friendships, dating, the hidden meanings in conversations past, and the other 65% about practical stuff - food, money, my job. Scarce are the deeper thoughts - happiness, life philosophies, and long-term dreams. I feel as if the entertainment that I surround myself with is dictating how I should act, and what I should think about.

Is MTV correct when they put forward the idea that 18-25 year-olds are inherently social beings, legitimate in our preoccupations with the networks of people around us? Are all the pop songs about love and the movies about high school so popular because they speak the truth about this 7-year period? Or is pop culture indeed selling young people short, stressing the superficial stuff and disregarding what's essential, like where we're going with our lives?

I guess that happiness, one of those terms I've just used to describe "the essential parts of life," is a combination of our social and financial and intellectual desires. We have to gauge each part of our life, and what we want out of it, and figure out a harmonious integration of the three. Gosh, that's so cheesy, but that's my temporary conclusion.