It’s been coming on gradually for the past several years, probably since my late-30’s.
After “Joe Millionaire” I lost interest in those “pick-a-spouse” shows. I can’t get invested in that.
I’ve tried watching sitcoms, some of the ads for “How I Met Your Mother” are amusing, but after a couple of minutes I get all squirmy and bored.
Commercials for movies make me want to hide under a table, they’re just way too intense.
OnDemand is at least commercial-free, I can watch “Intervention” and “Hoarders”, and I kind of like those crazy British ladies who chide people over their filthy homes, but that’s about it. I don’t know the people on People, and most of Perez’s gossip is beyond me (though I do like his doodles).
And the tragic thing is, I don’t care!
Give me Seinfeld reruns and WKRP and I’m a happy camper.
I’m reminded of the stereotypical old fart from my youth, still listening to Burns and Allen.
Now I see why advertisers don’t bother targeting those of us past the 35-44 age group. We’re indifferent to their ploys.
I’d have to say, at 42…don’t know if I don’t care or what. I always have the TV on, for “company” or background, but I just don’t have the attention span to sit down for anything but Intervention. I think depression and being stressed for the past year has a lot to do with it, but, who knows?
I stopped “keeping up” with TV shows when I started having kids; they always watched their kid shows and I was never one to sit up and watch TV after they went to bed. So I got out of the habit of TV watching when I was about 25 years old.
So I haven’t kept up with it for about 25 years (I’m about to turn 50). Sometimes that’s awkward in conversation 'cause I don’t know what people are talking about. Now I can just say that I’m old and I forgot.
I’m 25 and I don’t watch much TV save Proj Runway, Big Love when it’s on, and the occasional House Hunters on HGTV. I listen to some new music but the music I really obsess over is the stuff from the early sixties that few people my age really like. I still stay more or less current with “what’s going on” because it’s kind of hard not to but I think most of it’s really really lame.
I was never really into pop culture that much after discovering 60’s rock in my teens, but I still watched the movies and listened to some of the music.
I got out of it totally in my late 20’s when those lame scooters came back into style around 1999. After that, I pretty much left pop culture behind permanently. Never saw an episode of the Sopranos, followed Oz and Sons of Anarchy for a couple of weeks respectively before tuning out, and don’t get me started on reality TV.
I still watched Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, and some of the music coming out nowadays is fantastic, but I recognize maybe half the movie titles on the marquee and none of the TV shows anywhere.
I’ve never really been “with it” in regards to pop culture.
In high school, I’d listen to classical music rather than AC/DC, Led Zepplin, Madonna, Michael Jackson and the like.
After I hit 35-40 my lack of interest in pop culture only increase. While I recognize some names like Brittney Spears or Christina Aguilar (sp?) or ?Lindsey Lohan I couldn’t pick them out of a lineup or recognize any of their songs/movies/tv shows. My wife teases me about listening to Ren & Stimpy music because I have several CD’s with music from and similar to the type that show used.
I don’t have cable or satallite and pretty much just watch stuff from Netflix. I don’t watch sports, I’ve never seen American Idol or any reality TV.
The few things I do watch are Big Bang Theory, Dollhouse (on DVD). I do have an MP3 player but would rather listen to the Jack Benny Show than listen to music, and if it was available during high school, I’d probably have said the same thing.
In my middle thirties, I’m fifty six now. I worked nightshift for about six years. I LOVED TV. I was really surprised how quickly I was able to NOT CARE anymore. There is not one show that I HAVE to watch.
I haven’t gone to a theater to watch a movie in ten years, haven’t rented a movie in eight years. I guess I’m an old coot. I do LOVE to read though.
Rande…
I’ve never been that big on TV and I was late coming into my own where music was concerned (I’d been a devotee of Christian rock whenever I was a teenager), so it was easy for me to start getting lost around my mid-30s. I still try to tenuously stay in the know by reading stuff like Entertainment Weekly, but as far as actually caring, can’t say that I do. And I’m about to turn 42.
The music stopped for me in 1987, when I became a mom. Can’t say why, exactly - maybe MTV stopped showing music videos? The most up to date song on my list is Beck (Ondelay). I’m perfectly happy listening to the oldies, watching classic movies on TCM, and I do like a handful of must-see TV shows. True Blood, Mad Men, Lost, American Idol, Grey’s Anatomy, Medium, Desperate Housewives, House. That about covers it for TV, though I love Man vs. Wild, Mythbusters, and Dirty Jobs. I still love musicals and epics and fantasy (Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings). I do read the gossip and blind item blogs, though having a hard time putting faces to the names. All the Jennifers and Kates are so generic, Angelina Jolie, Jake Gyllenhal, Gossip Girls - can’t get fired up over ANY of them. So, to sum up, I do try to keep up but find 90% of popular culture rather…meh.
Far too early. I think that, coming of age in the days of grunge and “generation X”, and finding a lot in the pop-culture of the mid- and late-nineties to identify with, I just fell off when the 2000s hit. It seemed like the grunge era collapsed overnight, and suddenly the airwaves were clogged with Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys and the like; as if a mutiny had taken place and pop culture was wrested away from me and my peers and completely taken over by our little brothers and sisters, who had always thought we were overly serious pretentious twats. Somehow these younglings preferred just having fun, and hanging out at the mall, and chatting over AIM, to engaging in self-satisfied rants about how corporate greed and consumer culture were destroying our individuality.
Some of us found refuge in the ‘indie rock’ scene, but it never really did anything for me. Eventually I was content to fade into obscurity; eschewing reality TV, not being able to identify a Kanye or Lady Gaga song. And so I find myself a crotchety old man in my early thirties, listening to Celtic music and classic rock, only occasionally thinking wistfully of the days of old, wondering where it all went wrong.
I was never very into pop culture. In 1950, I used my bar mitzvah geld to buy our family’s first TV and then watched it less than anybody else. I watched (and enjoyed) Milton Berle, Jackie Gleason and the Hit Parade. After I started college, I didn’t have time for TV (I was also working full time, at least in theory) and then I got a job in NY, got married and went to Urbana, IL for four years and still didn’t own a TV. Then I moved to Montreal and got a TV because I expected to enjoy hockey. I did for a few years and then the fighting turned me off. I still watch mostly sports (baseball and curling; I gave up on football decades ago) and occasinally other things. I never watched a single episode of Jack Paar and successors (whom I cannot name), although I have seen Jon Stewart a few times. As for pop music, most films, they are a closed book to me.
For about the past decade I feel like pop culture has passed me by and I really don’t care!
I think it was when Seinfeld ended it’s run with an incomprehensible finale (was that in 1999?) that I realized I have more to do with my time than be caught up in the show/movie/celebrity of the moment.
I only occasionally check out entergainment mags at the library and know pop culture stuff from web pages. It makes me a little sad because I used to be such a fan of the Oscars, Emmys, and other award shows, the last couple years I’ve watched but not really cared who won.
There are some shows that I tried to get into…Flash Forward, V, Modern Family, Community…I set my DVR to record them but I only watched a couple episodes of each and just wasn’t interested enough to keep going.
I did allow myself to get caught up in Battlestar Galactica over the last couple years. I loved that show with a burning passion. But that also ended with a questionable finale and I have a bad taste in my brain STILL because of that!! The last show I really was excited to watch other than BSG was Boston Legal. I can’t think of a movie that I am really interested in seeing at a theatre, no, not even Avatar.
Since I’m a mom now I feel like I will have to invest time in a few years to keep up on what’s trendy so I know what she’s getting interested in. But that’s down the pike a bit, she’s only 1 so Yo Gabba Gabba! is as trendy as it gets right now.
Because that’s how old I was on the day when Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones was released. I went into the theater firmly believing that Star Wars was the coolest thing ever and that watching this movie would be one of the high points of my life. I left with a realization that Star Wars was a bunch of crap, a realization that soon spread to other movies, shows, and franchises.
I wouldn’t say it’s so much “give a rat’s patooty” as “much more difficult to comprehend and/or recognize” - mid-30s, probably early 2000s.
Before then, I could hear a new song, and instantly know the artist, hear the name of a musician and know what songs and style of music were associated with them, see photos of celebrities and know who they were, and vice versa. Now, it’s much more difficult; I’ll hear a song on the radio that I like, but I can’t associate it with any artist, or see a Maxim cover featuring a photo spread about some actress, and think “who the hell is she?” Even with practice listening to Sirius, and having the name of a song and artist displayed on the receiver, I’m still having a difficult time.
I haven’t ossified, though, unlike my parents (born in the early 1930s), whose tastes in music were firmly locked in place by the mid 1950s. Anything that wasn’t jazz, big band or standards threw them, even something from the early 1960s or very popular bands like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Dad could recognize the music from any band with a name that included the words “And His Orchestra”, but forget any band with an electric guitar.
TV was given the title “boob tube” for a reason. It was considered mentally low-rent entertainment from day-one so it was the everyday boob who watched it.
I always thought soap operas were the bottom of the barrel but that title now goes to the “reality shows” which in my opinion are the exact opposite of reality. Nobody I know behaves in such a socially retarded way. That is followed by the various judge shows, follwed by “pro-wrestling”, then Jerry Springer & company and finally, infomercials. I would rather see a test pattern than any of these programs.
It’s not that I’m a snob but the standards set by television are a reflection of social change and that astounds me.
I’m 51 and I like the newest music, the latest technology and everything that progress provides. You can keep the jackass anti-social entertainment of reality show’s.
At 43, it hasn’t happened yet. I listen to and watch what entertains me, and leave the rest. It’s actually one of my pet peeves that so many Boomers say things like, “There hasn’t been any good music made since 1980.” Well, you’re just flat-out wrong - there’s a lot of crap out there now (just like there always has been), and there’s some damned good stuff, too. I just went and got a lot of current Top 20 songs to check them out, and there are some new artists that I’m liking a whole lot (Mika, Sam Sparrow, Them Crooked Vultures, Rihanna, Elbow and Kevin Rudolf to name a few).*
I don’t watch a lot of Narcissism On Parade (reality shows), but I enjoy American Idol. I also like some current sitcoms.
*ETA: I realized it looks like those artists are all Top 20, which they aren’t.
