Here's a quote from the First Things blog by Carl Trueman, about our passion for entertainment:
For Augustine, the human obsession with entertainment in general was
problematic. He saw the need of people to be constantly entertained as a
deceptive act of self-love, an attempt to flee the reality of our own
mortality. That is why he lambasts the Roman exiles in Hippo who have
fled Rome in the wake of Alaric’s attack and yet who persist in the
desperate pursuit of theatrical entertainment (City of God
1:32). The theater was a means of distracting them from the real world
with its real challenges and claims upon them. No doubt he would regard
the modern affluent West, with its penchant for paying sports stars far
more than nurses or doctors or carers, as a prime example of the way our
need for distraction shapes the moral priorities of our economies.