How MTV's Cribs may have rewired the brain of its younger viewers

The New York Times

Watching Cribs as kids, "there was an unvarnished symmetry to what we would put in our big homes if we got rich and what these celebrities, who actually got rich, put in theirs," says Talmon Joseph Smith. "Watching now, in the midst of this decade’s suffocatingly granular obsession over cultivated looks — and its public policing of taste — the early-to-mid-2000s world of Cribs is an aspirational, if sometimes funny, breath of fresh air. Just beyond the giddiness of getting a peek at the nouveau riche, though, was an insidious implanting of rudderless, capitalist instincts deep into our still-forming brains. I’d like to think that I watched Cribs with my siblings and friends solely as comfort food to be consumed, digested, then mentally excreted. In hindsight, however, it probably affected the neural circuits in our brains that regulate motivation. When not awe-inspiring the show was still inspiring in a simpler sense: If you didn’t want a crib like that (and there were plenty of eccentricities to not like), you definitely wanted the money to be able to own a crib like that. Correlation doesn’t equal causation. But having never harvested thoughts about extraordinary wealth, after years of watching Cribs, 'I’m gonna be rich when I grow up' became — along with the rote mission of doing good — a central life goal of mine for a while. In that, I’m sure I’m not alone."