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Overindulging in celebrity gossip may be signs of an underactive social life. When I was a college student, I never read celebrity magazines and hardly watched TV. The social world in college was simply too rich and involving and immediate to leave any time or interest for the world of celebrity. Once I graduated, however, People magazine crept into my life, and I noticed that during my loneliest periods (when I moved to a new city, or my current social group dissolved, or I was working in an isolated job) I would spend hours each week reading celebrity magazines.
I think humans prefer to gossip about people they actually know and to whom they themselves matter. It's difficult to find a social group out in the real world, though, and we often work long days with people we don't have much in common with, isolated in cubicles that leave little opportunity for interacation. As a result, we turn to celebrity gossip to fill our natural desire to ponder human behavior. It's far more fulfilling, though, to be concerned with people we actually know, who we mean something to as well.
