I know many of you are running to the comments to claim you could not care less about these people, or any celebrities. But evolution says you are wrong, so suck it. Even if your homepage isn't your favorite gossip column, being aware of the goings-on in the lives of people more famous than us fills our brains' need to see patterns in the world, to make familiar storylines out of chaos. And it is a need. Some studies found that upwards of 80 to 90 percent of all conversations in public are gossip.
wikipedia.org
In my case, 64 percent is about the places I would bang Michael Fassbender.
Humans like stories because we look for the world around us to fit into a narrative -- the rags-to-riches tale, the sports underdog overcoming the odds, the karaoke hustler singing a song about sex with his daughter, etc. You saw this happen immediately with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's breakup. The original reason reported for their divorce was Pitt having an affair with his recent co-star Marion Cotillard. What goes around comes around, Angie! Once a cheater, always a cheater! People knew how to deal with that version of the story; it was nice and simple and fit into a form that we are all familiar with. When it turned out to have nothing to do with cheating and became much more complicated (like all divorces), people lost interest.
George Clerk/iStock
We moved on to the other 35 percent of topics: dreams we had, food we ate, and bowel movements we took.
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