America is known for many things. Chief among them is the entertainment industry that we generally fuel worldwide. Unfortunately, many of us also treat celebrities like gods and goddesses when they deserve no such treatment.
Celebrity worship is a real problem. It gives young Americans unrealistic standards for how they should dress, act and think as they grow up. This leads to adults who have incorrect priorities in life.
It also gives the average person an abundance of self-doubt and insecurity whether they actually “keep up” with the famous or not.
If you’re someone who is always watching TMZ and MTV, you feel like you’ll never have the glamorous life of the people depicted. If you don’t choose to study the lives of pop culture icons, you’re inevitably out of the loop when people talk about them — and people talk about them almost constantly.
The worst problem isn’t even the fact that we idolize celebrities. It’s who we decide to put on a pedestal. Kim Kardashian immediately springs to mind.
What has she actually done with her life to become famous other than having sex on camera? Nothing. Now she gets to monetize her ill-gotten fame and live like a queen for the rest of her life.
Her iPhone app, “Kim Kardashian: Hollywood,” has made more than $700,000 in microtransactions from people who want to taste what it’s like to be popular. In a video game.
It’s meaningless, but still we constantly fuel it with our money.
Kardashian also makes money from endorsing products through social media sites like Twitter. Companies will pay her a huge amount of money to simply write an endorsement in less than 140 characters.
It doesn’t matter if the product is good. It matters that Kim endorsed it.
I asked myself why we are so obsessed with people who, in truth, don’t matter. The only answer I could come up with is that we’ve given up on making our lives interesting, so we sit back and turn on the television to absorb someone else’s.
When we want drama, we can see which celebrities are fighting about some ridiculous issue. When we need a laugh, we look at who got caught in the latest sex scandal. When we can’t even feel fulfilled on our own, we watch vapid people living luxurious lives in Hollywood. It’s all a distraction.
I can almost understand the celebrity worship of an incredible actor or a first-rate musician. Those people at least have talent that they’ve used to shape the world in some way.
But the Kardashians of the world run rampant and have far too much influence on our society. They’re bad role models to the young people consuming their media, and they’re famous for absolutely no reason.
I’m not going to ask that we stop following the lives of the stars. I know that won’t happen. But I do ask that we make better decisions about who gets time on our screens and on our minds.
Simply put, stop making stupid people famous.
dylmoore@indiana.edu
