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.