I suspect that many people who enjoy television, if asked, would claim that socializing with freinds or other things are somehow better or more pure, but only because TV is a low status medium, and so saying that watching TV isn't "real living" has become somewhat of a cached thought within our culture; I'd suspect you'd have a much harder time finding people who will claim that spending time enjoying art or reading classic literature or other higher status fictional media doesn't count as "real living".

It's not that I want to tell them whether they're "really living", it's that I think they don't think spending so much of their free time on TV is "really living".

I think I might actually expect people to endorse different activities in this context at different levels of abstraction.

That is, if you asked J. Random TV Consumer to rank (say) TV and socialization, or study, or some other venue for self-improvement, I wouldn't be too surprised if they consistently picked the latter. But if you broke down these categories into specific tasks, I'd expect individual shows to rate more highly -- in some cases much more highly -- than implied by the category rating.

I'm not sure what this implies about true preferences.