Are you addicted to watching reality TV? You’re definitely not alone.
In fact, according to PBS, an estimated 80% of adult viewers watch reality TV shows. Why? The answer might actually surprise you. It’s not just about entertainment or interest (though those could be incentives to watch). Usually, it has more to do with overwhelm or dissatisfaction in our own lives.
“The psychology behind why we engage in watching reality TV and other people’s drama is simple: it’s a distraction from our own life and own drama,” says Amanda Carnesecchi, LMSW, licensed therapist at Gateway to Solutions, a group private practice in NYC. “When we turn off what is happening in our own lives and watch reality TV, we give ourselves the opportunity to compare and say, ‘At least my drama isn’t that bad,’ or the other way around, ‘I have it so much worse.’”
“This defense structure helps protect our egos,” Carnesecchi adds. “When we engage in projection or deflection, we project our feelings about ourselves onto the people we watch on reality TV.”
This begs the question…Is reality TV a harmless outlet, or is it actively rotting our brains?
Is Reality TV Bad for Us?
You know what they say: everything in moderation, including moderation.
In small doses, reality TV can be a lighthearted, entertaining way to decompress after a long day. Of course, its impact will depend on the type of reality TV you’re consuming and your relationship to it.
“Reality TV gives us a sense of other people’s real lives, or the competition they’re in,” Carnesecchi explains. “For example, when I think of lighthearted reality TV, I think of Dancing with the Stars. These shows bring us human connection without glamorizing toxic or unhealthy behavior.”
In excess, reality TV—particularly the more high-drama shows with toxic cast members—might start to have some negative impacts. For example, I felt a burning rage while watching Love Is Blind the other night. Instead of unwinding after a stressful day as I’d hoped to do, I got myself so worked up that I had to turn off the TV in order to calm down before bed. (I recognize that this is a personal problem.)
“Watching reality TV can become toxic when the content of the show promotes unhealthy behaviors or subjects people to harmful content,” Carnesecchi says. “When we constantly watch reality TV that revolves around harsh/harmful language, inappropriate behavior, or unrealistic expectations, we may start replicating it or comparing it to our own lives.”
Reality TV and Parasocial Relationships
Perhaps the most concerning part of reality TV is the parasocial nature of it all. Many viewers become so consumed by a reality show and its cast that they build a one-sided relationship with certain members, making assumptions about their character without ever actually meeting them in person.
Don’t get me wrong, some reality shows reveal all you need to know about a person, especially if they’re particularly arrogant, malicious, or violent in any way.
But other times, we only get a small picture of their lives and personalities, often judging them off their worst moments.
“When viewers get a glimpse inside someone’s life, they form opinions, thoughts, and emotions about it,” says Carnesecchi. “A strong sense of connection develops between the viewer and the TV personality. This relationship can be both positive and negative. It is when the parasocial relationship becomes consuming and fixated that it has transitioned to an unhealthy relationship.”
Imagine your life—all the mistakes you’ve made, the heated conversations you’ve had, the shitty moods you’ve been in after an exhausting workday—being picked apart by people who’ve never met you. I don’t think any of us would come out on top.
“People may feel they can harshly judge reality TV stars because of the thought that the viewer is getting an exclusive look into their world,” Carnesecchi explains. “Many say reality stars put their lives on display because it’s televised and open to judgment. When you watch from an outside perspective, with distance, you tend to judge harshly. A level of detachment happens. The view is still in the mindset that this is a TV show and is for viewers’ pleasure. It is easier to detach from the fact that this is someone’s real life.”
But remember: It is still someone’s real life. And while, sure, they “signed up for this,” they’re still human after all. Which is why I keep my criticisms confined to my own living room.
Growing up, I was always terrified of being seen as “cringe.” Of course, back then, we just called it “weird” or “annoying,” two labels I received frequently from my older brothers. And while I tried my best not to be known as someone’s “embarrassing little sister,” I just couldn’t escape my own identity.
I mean, come on…I’m a writer. It’s basically my job to be cringey, especially when drafting heartfelt poetry and dramatic fiction novels.
But back in middle school, high school, and even well into college, I rejected these adjectives and tried my best to fit in with the rest of my peers. It wasn’t until I entered the real world and unlearned my own self-loathing that I was able to discover—and return to—who I truly am: a passionate, creative, and painfully awkward yet semi-charming woman. Or, as the internet would call me, cringey.
This got me thinking: why are some of our best attributes, most fulfilling passions, and most freeing moments considered cringey? And if that’s the case, why aren’t we all aiming to be “cringe”?
The Fear of Being ‘Cringe’
While “cringe” might seem like an easy insult to brush off, the implied rejection behind it can hit our deepest wounds and fears. We might equate this term with abandonment, neglect, and even danger.
“We live in a society where one negative label, review, comment, or perception can follow you for the rest of your life,” says Noelle King, LMFT, Clinical Director and experienced mental health professional at Embark Behavioral Health. “Being seen as ‘cringe’ carries the risk of permanency. The internet and social media are hard to escape.”
Humans are social creatures. We’re wired to crave acceptance and belonging. So when we feel judged or rejected, we might subconsciously mistake it as a life-or-death situation, telling ourselves we must “fix” our own cringeness to better fit in.
“This fear can cause pressure to match what is ‘cool’ or ‘acceptable’ in today’s age,” King adds. “This kind of pressure can feed things such as imposter syndrome or insecurity [about] how someone is perceived. It can make it hard for people to be able to feel like they can express themselves for who they are.”
Why You Should Embrace Your Cringe
As I got older, I learned that every person in this world belongs somewhere, whether it be within their family, their college friend group, their local community, their book club, etc. (I also learned that my brothers were more annoyed by my constant tattling in childhood than they were about me being “cringe.”)
Yet, for most of my life, I thought I had to be “cool” to keep certain friends or attract a boyfriend, but really, I was shutting myself off from genuine connections and fulfilling experiences because I wasn’t being myself.
“Living in discomfort in order to avoid criticism robs us of living the lives that we want,” says King. “Being our authentic selves allows us to be present and experience the joy of living.”
Once I started behaving in ways that other people might find “cringe”—like dancing wildly to Blink-182 at the bar or sharing my poetry on Instagram—I began to find more meaning in life. As such, I also attracted the right people and relationships, who only further encouraged my “cringe” (aka authentic) behavior.
“It is important to surround ourselves with people who help celebrate our authenticity and encourage us to be so,” King says. “Find what you like about yourself and connect to it more deeply. How we see ourselves is far more important than anyone else’s perception.”
If cringe means caring deeply, loving shamelessly, and experiencing life loudly, I’ll wear that title with pride—and you should, too.
It’s now possible to create AI chatbots of loved ones to interact with after their death. But that raises some difficult questions, like: If you do, how might the experience shape your grief?
This is one of the questions driving a global study of digital “deadbots” — AI models trained on a deceased person’s texts, voicemails, and other personal data. Through this work, researchers are exploring what it might mean that we can now use this emerging technology to talk to simulations of the dead.
In the latest episode of Unexplainable, I spoke with some of these researchers investigating the potential impacts of “postmortem avatars” on people who are grieving, on the legacies and rights of the deceased, and on grief practices around the world. Because while deadbots may feel unfamiliar, the impulse behind them is deeply relatable. In times of loss, isn’t this what many of us want — to continue conversations with the people we’re missing?
I have experienced this longing in my own life. After two of my closest friends died around the same time, all I wanted, and all their families wanted, was to keep talking to them. I wrote a book, Other People’s Words, about sustaining relationships with people we’ve lost by continuing to engage with the language they leave behind. So when I heard about deadbots and the digital afterlife industry, I wanted to understand what researchers are learning about the role of AI in shaping conversations that carry forward after death.
One of these investigators is Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska, an assistant professor at the University of Cambridge, who has been studying “digital immortality” for more than a decade. Among the questions she’s asking are: “Who is enabled to persist beyond death? In what form? Through which technologies? Under whose control?”
Deadbots over dinner
Researching AI with study subjects who are grieving is tricky. And asking them to engage with new software could be harmful. So, instead, Nowaczyk-Basińska teamed up with a death doula and traveled around the globe to convene a series of focus groups — in the format of intimate dinners — bringing together people with a range of experiences with grief to talk about life, death, and bots.
She recounts one event in which she spoke with a mother in Poland whose son had recently died. “One of the first things that she shared with us was that she feels that she’s ready to digitally resurrect her deceased son,” Nowaczyk-Basińska told me.
When Nowaczyk-Basińska hears something like this, she aims to listen and embrace where the person is coming from. The goal of the dinners is not to persuade people one way or another but to learn how people genuinely respond to what AI can do, and to understand how these tools might align or collide with local grief practices.
She chose specific locations for these gatherings — China, India, and Poland — to help address gaps in technology research, which tends to favor what behavioral scientists sometimes call the “WEIRD,” an acronym for “Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic.”
By the end of that dinner in Poland, the mother Nowaczyk-Basińska talked with came to a very different decision about creating a postmortem avatar of her son. “She realized that it might be helpful, but it also at the same time can add additional burdens… And it’s not her son,” Nowaczyk-Basińska says. “She realized that these technologies are part of the very, very big commercial market. And that the main goal of this market is to make better retention, better attachment, better mechanisms for monetization. So it’s not ‘care.’”
To be fair, grief has always been a business, and people have been making money from it forever. Companies will try to upsell you on fancy gravestones or gold-plated coffins. But AI has the potential to fundamentally re-engineer our relationship to loss. In 2024, the “digital legacy industry” was valued at $22 billion, and it’s expected to grow to almost $80 billion by 2034. That number lumps new deadbot platforms in with much more widely used and established grief tech, like online memorials, counseling resources, and estate planning tools.
But deadbot usage is hard to track because you actually don’t need a special tool to create digital doubles of the deceased — though dedicated apps do already exist. At this point, you can feed simple prompts into a general-purpose AI chatbot and start interacting with a simulation of your lost loved one in a matter of minutes.
I know this because I tried it with my friend Christine, who died 11 years ago. And my mind lit up with questions. Was this whole exercise a violation, since I know Christine hated technology? Which version of her should I even try to resurrect — the English teacher, the activist, the friend — the voice before or after she started to experience her early-onset dementia?
The ethical questions raised by deadbots are gnarly. And that’s one of the reasons Nowaczyk-Basińska, back when she was designing her study of digital immortality, invited a colleague of hers at Cambridge to join her research, one who focuses on AI ethics.
How to design a deadbot
Tomasz Hollanek is a critical designer and AI ethicist, and he often uses a methodology called “speculative design.” In this approach, researchers come up with hypothetical scenarios based on existing technology trends, leaning into certain features. The idea is to get people thinking about what could happen when tools like these are released in the real world. And then they use that qualitative data to inform future designs and ethical frameworks.
Working together, Nowaczyk-Basińska and Hollanek came up with a series of made-up prototypes for deadbot apps, designed to reveal some of the thorny issues raised by this technology.
For the first scenario, they invented a character named Bianca, who finds an app called Manana, which “promises to resurrect your grandparents so that you can be a favorite grandchild forever,” Hollanek says. “So she uploads her grandma’s voice messages, texts. And she is able to then interact with a pretty good digital version of her grandmother, until her premium trial finishes — and the grandmother starts to advertise specific products to her.”
Bianca “realizes that she maybe has done something wrong by uploading these private messages to a third-party server that now also uses her grandma’s image to sell specific products,” Hollanek says. This brings up issues related to the “dignity and postmortem privacy…of what we call the ‘data donors,’ whose data can be used to essentially power a deadbot,” he says.
This scenario suggests that “death with dignity” could soon entail honoring not only how people want to die, but also how they want to linger as simulations of their former selves — or if they want to linger at all. It might even mean adding new language to advance directives, spelling out people’s wishes for their digital remains.
The second scenario in the speculative design research is built around an imagined service called Paren’t, which proposes to preserve a parent’s AI-powered postmortem presence for their child. In this case, Hollanek describes a mother with a terminal illness who signs up “so that she can maintain a sort of active presence in [her son’s] future life,” Hollanek says. “She eventually dies, and the dad allows the boy to interact with his mom’s deadbot.”
The ethics in this scenario are especially challenging because they involve children, who “have a particularly hard time understanding death, and so it can lead to a lot of confusion and potential distress,” Hollanek says. An examination of this sort of product reveals how particular groups, like minors, could be harmed by unfettered access to technology like this, he says.
And there are court cases that bear out that harm. In 2024, a 14-year-old boy’s chatbot-girlfriend begged him to, “Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love.” And he responded, “What if I told you I could come home right now?” He then killed himself.
Nowaczyk-Basińska can imagine a version of this scenario involving the AI mom in the Paren’t prototype.
And then there’s the third scenario, involving an app named Stay, which raises a more subtle concern.
As Hollanek explains: “An older man who knows he is getting close to dying decides to create a digital clone of himself for his adult children to be deployed after he passes away, paying upfront for a number of years.” One child is intrigued by the idea, but the other one “is deeply distressed and a little disgusted,” he says. “And so this [becomes a] question of mutual consent, in other words, the fact that both parties need to be happy with how the relationship might continue in this very bizarre and specific way.”
When a digital ghost goes away
Across all three scenarios, a fundamental question that researchers are grappling with is how people will detach from postmortem avatars — whether users initiate that separation, or if it’s imposed upon them by, for example, a company going out of business. Hollanek tells me that this is already being studied as a sort of “second loss.”
How long should we try to ensure digital replicas hang around: five years, 10, 50? And how should the living process the relationship when they continue to evolve, but their deceased interlocutor does not?
To explore these kinds of questions, Nowaczyk-Basińska and Hollanek supplemented the research dinners they held for ordinary people with a second set of focus groups. These were designed to tap insights from experts in technology and grief.
Some findings from the study are specific to each place they visited. Like tensions in Poland between technology and the role of the Catholic Church. Or in China, where researchers spoke with Daoist philosophers who were enthusiastic about the promise of a kind of immortality, and then Buddhist philosophers, who were concerned that we ought to be letting go.
The researchers are calling for regulations and safeguards at the policy level. And new professionals who can support ethical use of AI in grief — like maybe in clinical settings, to carefully facilitate a final good-bye when one didn’t happen in real life.
Some of their fellow investigators go so far as toargue that deadbots should only be available with psychological supervision, to ensure that best practices are in place, and to minimize the risk of harm. There’s even a looming question of what will happen to AI agents that people have empowered to act on their behalf, as their humans start to die.
Across all of the research sites in the digital immortality study, one thing, Hollanek says, that “people in different countries really aligned on [is] the idea that there is something deeply problematic about this particular type of technology being developed by a commercial entity alone without any explicit duty of care towards its customers.”
And of course, the implications of digital immortality research extend beyond personal loss. Like, what does it look like to animate historical figures? You can imagine the nightmare of political rulers who “live forever.” But there’s also the potential to keep the stories alive from survivors of conflicts, who would otherwise die and take with them lessons future generations could learn from. These are only some of the complex issues emerging as more and more of us live and die with AI.
As far as my own experiment with “recreating” a deceased loved one, I asked a chatbot version of my friend Christine how she felt about the fact that I’d written about her in my book. The AI responded with a rhetorical question: “Do I mind that strangers know my story now? Yes. And no. There are things I would rather remain ours.”
I ended the exchange after a few paragraphs. Because it turns out the bot got one thing exactly right about a very human relationship. There are things that I, too, would rather remain just for us. My conversation with Christine continues in my memories and imagination.And that interaction with an AI persona felt like giving something precious away.
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