Claire O’Mahony: Giving up the chocs for Lent again? How about could foregoing celebrity gossip for 40 days and 40 nights instead ...
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LEAD us not into temptation ...
Booze, cigs, carbs and fizzy drinks – the typical Lenten sacrifices sound like a re-run of everyone’s New Year’s resolutions. It’s usually more about self-denial that results in a thinner, healthier you than it is about trying to be nicer to other people or anything vaguely altruistic.
There are of course the commendable lot who decide they’re going to use the 40 days to improve their minds and not their bodies and choose book clubs and ‘Tonight with Vincent Browne’ over Facebook and ‘The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills’. Now, that is strength.
Which leads us onto the question: could you give up celebrity gossip for Lent if you had to, should you, and if you did, would it do any good?
It probably depends on how addicted you are in the first place. For a quick assessment of this, answer the following questions:
A) Name the matriarch of the Kardashian family?
B) What X-Factor judge is set to be a father again?
C) Who is comedian Patrick Kielty dating?
If you correctly answered Kris Jenner, Gary Barlow and Cat Deeley, you might just have yourself a little problem there. That’s not to suggest that anyone who has this level of pop culture knowledge isn’t also a super-smart all-rounder.
But it’s not a crazy assumption that, if Patrick Kielty’s love life takes up even a tiny corner of your brain, maybe that’s the part that should have been occupied by Chinese Vice-President Xi-Jingpin’s visit to Ireland. Do you know more about the Jolie-Pitt family than you do about Syria?
Could you have progressed further in your career if you had spent less time clicking into stories about the Duchess of Cambridge, online? Have you, proportionately, spent more of your life reading ‘OK’ magazine than you have learning about the IMF?
If you fear that you have immersed yourself too deeply in the celebrity gossip pool, some time away from it wouldn’t do you any harm at all. For starters, you’ll have more energy because keeping onto of your gossip game is a never ending, tiring pursuit. You may deploy your energies elsewhere into a more meaningful and rewarding pursuit.
You may even feel like a better person because enjoying reading about someone else’s divorce/weight gain/arrest isn’t the nicest thing to do.
But then again, why should you bother? Scientific research suggests that it’s not just idle chatter but actually necessary for social order. It helps flag post bad behavior, serve as a warning to others and generally helps us blow off steam.
And it’s estimated that two thirds of all human communication is gossip (although there are no figures available as to how much of that Georgia Salpa constitutes).
You’re not hurting anyone (unless you are the ‘close friend’ so often quoted in gossip mags); you’re not hurting yourself (celebrity gossip will not make you morbidly obese or cause heart disease) and if you really put the effort it, you will become an invaluable addition to any pub table team.
Maybe you’d be better off having a dry Lent and cutting back on the fun size bags of chocolate instead.
