Here's how the best-selling author Michael Crichton described our need to be constantly entertained:

Today, everybody expects to be entertained, and they expect to be entertained all the time… . Everyone must be amused, or they will switch: switch brands, switch channels, switch parties, switch loyalties. This is the intellectual reality of Western society [today]. In other centuries, human beings wanted to be saved, or improved, or freed, or educated. But [now] they want to be entertained. The great fear is not of disease or death, but of boredom.