Spoiled by special effects - or: When nothing is enough

Path at night, with a little snow, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

I feel it is often difficult to do that kind of photography I like - personal, documentary, earthy - when you are bombarded by flashy images in advertisements, in movies, in magazines, in documentaries on tv. Of course, these images are not bad images, but they tend to emphasize the "special effects" kind of photography, where technology is a key, as is a big budget.

There was a nice piece in the Onion recently, titled Well, That Sunset Sucked, which I feel touches exactly this topic:

I left work early, picked up a bottle of wine, and drove Jenny out to the country to have a picnic and watch the sunset.
[...]
I had high hopes. All the signs were right. The sun was dipping down to the mountain peaks, which looked almost purple in the autumn dusk. But as the light spilled over the landscape in a flood of fiery streaks—if you can even call them streaks—I thought to myself, "Where is this going?"
[...]
After a few minutes of the most monotonous cascade of delicate apricot and peach tones I've ever seen, a cloud, pushed across the drooping sun by a faint breeze, became instantly illuminated from behind, sending spears of light down to the earth below. "What a crock of shit," I thought. All my planning and one wispy cloud has to go and ruin everything.

What are our expectations of photography? And of life? Do we really see what is in front of us, or are we spellbound by the special-effects kind of reality?