It’s time to dethrone celebrities. We idolize and build careers for these people who we claim to despise yet love to discuss their newest romantic fling or cancellable moment. By not attributing any action behind our words, we become just as hypocritical as the people we supposedly hate. We need to convert rhetoric into reality and attack this problem immediately, through disengaging from the cult of celebrity.
When so disappointed with the way our individual lives are going, we turn to other, more attractive or wealthy lives, to distract us from our own unfulfilled existences. I realize the therapeutic release this could bring to someone, but also the potential ramifications. We become so enveloped in someone else’s life that we forget we’re currently living our own.
Celebrities aren’t just distractors for personal livelihood, but also the public sphere. They exist as diversions from real things happening in the world, such as presidential elections or genocides. Not meant to inform, but sidetrack.
Their existence is very comparable to watching a joyful attractive person frolic through a perfect-looking meadow in a pill ad. They’re meant to distract you, hold your attention just long enough to pop the company’s name on the screen for the last two seconds. But what if we were to give the cute models less screen time, and focus more on the symptoms? No one would watch, but they should be forced to.
All of this is to plead to the average-looking, average salary-making, every-day people. We can deplatform celebrities who we don’t think deserve fame, who aren’t doing any good with it. This is one of the rare cases of if you ignore the problem, it will genuinely go away. So many people who are undeserving of fame, who don’t utilize their platform to speak out, just continue to live in their multi-million dollar mansion while we talk bad about them, as if they’re ever going to hear any of it.
While this can be done in other ways than social deplatforming, that would be the most direct effect. We’ve already seen people begin to spearhead this cause by choosing to not interact with celebrities’ posts. Unfollowing and lack of interaction on social media accounts does a lot more than one might think. A celebrity’s social identity is all they have so if we take that away, they’ll be forced to reckon with a real, normal life without unearned luxuries.
This isn’t to say I believe absolutely no one is worthy of fame. Some are able to capitalize off it in a way that benefits many people other than just themselves- but I would say that’s about 80 percent. We should be creating characters that actually help people. I want celebrities that our children could look up to, not gossip about. While celebrities provide much needed entertainment at times, our blind endorsement of unqualified people is distracting us from what really matters.
