By Colter Hettich, Features Editor

Celebrity news nauseates me, yet I catch myself mindlessly reading up on Britney Spears’ latest charade.

Why can’t I ignore it?

I stumbled across a discussion board at washingtonpost.com dedicated to the late Heath Ledger.

An anonymous post grabbed me and shed an entirely new light on the problem. The user wrote, “I know there are much more important and pressing/depressing issues… that is precisely why I read about celebrity gossip – it’s a break from all that.”

We need what celebrity gossip provides, but we are getting it at the expense of their privacy, normalcy and sometimes lives.

The unhealthy obsession with those who have celebrity status is undeniable. In May 2005, US Weekly paid $500,000 for photos of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in Kenya, reported nytimes.com. Entire television channels, such as E!, dedicate their airtime to anything and everything pertaining to celebrities. Thousands of people’s livelihoods depend on the ability to follow someone all day and snap candid photos of them from a distance. These jobs exist to meet our demands.

At the core of this obsession lies every person’s need to come up for air. Distracting yourself for moments at a time, whether intentionally or subconsciously, does not mean ignoring the problem. What possible good could come from walking from class to class consumed with anxiety and frustration? How does that help the problems you cannot stop thinking about?

Constantly flooding your mind with tragedies you can do nothing about is masochistic. Give concern, thought or best of all, help to the issues that trouble your mind, but do not allow them to consume you. The desire for awareness can quickly twist into a free guilt-trip.

So the next time you take a break from life, resist the urge to flip on entertainment news. Put in a good film, a TV show on DVD or maybe dare to read a book. Forget about the actors’ and actresses’ lives outside of their roles. Watch the characters. Be entertained. Enjoy talking about it with your friends.

Let entertainment live up to its name. You might be pleasantly surprised what a day is like without celebrity gossip.