Please Explain the Celeb Obsession to me

[dynasaw]

Yes, it's sad when someone--anyone-- dies, but as a Californian who sees the state heading toward meltdown, I am baffled by the focus on celebs and their doings. Am I so out of it? :dunce:

[latebloomer]

1. Opiate of the masses

A way for people to distract themselves from their own realities. Also a way for people to console themselves that even the rich, famous, talented and beautiful have troubles.

[Bucky]

2. There's an innate human need for pantheons, for personifying larger than life elements in life

In past human epochs you earthlings had polytheistic belief systems, dryads and naiads and woodland spirits, or you had panoplies of the departed you humans revered through ancestor worship watching over you through the muse of great-great-grandparents you never knew. Yet the core human impulse is to attach personality and human like characteristics onto these pantheons--Hera was jealous, Loki was mischievous, Kali destroyed and rebuilt, Osiris flooded out farmlands once a year to test the people. Forces outside your control yanked the trajectories of your lives. Placing a human face on nature, human accomplishment, and human turmoil made it easier to explain the wonder of it all--at least easier to accept than the discomfiting thought that life's comedies and tragedies were random and unappeasable.

In later generations this need for a pantheon was filled in different societies in ways that matched the philosophical trends of human ideologies. Communist states had their parades of workers' heroes, Catholic societies celebrated an endless diorama of saints and martyrs--each holding sway over a different facet of community life that the humans might need to pray over. In your current North American society with its consumer-driving ideology, the logical expression of this need for pantheon is filtered through the cult of celebrity: the outcasts fixate on Depeche Mode, the angry white recluses revel in the tears of Glenn Beck, the denizens of honky tonks integrate Dwight Yoakum to find fulfillment in their hearts. This is what you humans do. It's your characteristic behavior as a species.

Today people mount icons like Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, or Elvis Presley on their bedroom walls because these demigods validate identity, or perhaps something deeper, in the human heart. I have informally incorporated the human Martin Luther King, Jr, into my iconography in my "classroom" (a sort of collective instructional pod you humans use for warehousing your teenagers) because I find his philosophy useful and appealing. Others, more in tuned with North American style consumerism find greater emotive validation in the myths and fetishisms of currently living demigods and arguably this contributes a good deal more to the economic life of your planet. But the underlying priciple is the same: people just can't get enough of their "celebrities"--even though many of them haven't actually done anything worth celebrating.

[Rabrrrrrr]

3. Too many people seem to be able to find value only through the lives of the people they obsess over.

pretty sad, really.

[Swede]

4. People get to "know" famous people,so they are sad when they die.

We hear and see more of celebs than some of our family and friends. It's probably natural. Some will go overboard.

[qnr]

5. I'm not very interested in celebrities, per se - however, when one dies, it does tend

to bring back memories of certain periods of my life that I wouldn't otherwise think of.