The rules of the most basic celebrity game are simple. We watch the celebrity, so the celebrity is a special being. But the celebrity is in our world, so…we too are special! Thus you might want to watch a TV program with lots of pictures and video of the glamorous celebrity but with plenty of stories about how the celebrity messes up his or her life. The celebrity is at once elevated and brought down to earth.

Let’s face it. We human primates are just awed by high status individuals in our presence. We are wired to be excited by harmonious interaction with our fellows—think of the bliss that a successful sexual interaction or even a lively conversation brings. And when the interaction occurs with one we idealize—as in a romantic crush or even a tangential encounter with a celebrity—the level of our excitement is nearly overwhelming.

If you think about it, our games are often set up situations for stimulating our basic drives–competition, close cooperation, physical dominance, etc.—and we enjoy games because they can provide a significant emotional rush. The celebrity game stimulates the basic social pleasure of harmony with an admired person. But why is this game so popular in our society?

One of the basic problems in a society where fabulous accomplishments are revered and celebrated is that what most people do can’t be considered a fabulous accomplishment. Sure, it’s pretty meaningful to work hard at a challenging job or raise a child, but by definition fabulous things only get done by a few. And if fabulous things are what matter, most of us don’t. So our society provides a way for us to commune with the fabulous in the celebrity game, to briefly feel the excitement of interaction with the celebrity idol.

In every human society, such experiences of ecstasy are a way of cementing important commitments. And such is the case here: through our dealings with celebrities we learn that we should strive for something extraordinary, and we are given a small taste of the ecstasy that extraordinary accomplishments are said to provide. That helps us keep going, long after it has become obvious that we are not destined for greatness. But it also may leave us with a nagging feeling that our lives never really measured up.

Photo by Richard Yaussi

Photo by Annia316

I was a late bloomer. There’s some self-praise embedded in that statement, because it implies that I bloomed, a point that could be disputed. So we’ll just say that to the extent I bloomed, it happened late. Specifically: I didn’t start dating until my late teen years, and it was also then I finally stopped growing and discovered my admittedly limited athletic abilities. Maybe most important, it was when I was around 17 when I rather suddenly gained some self-confidence and awareness of who I was.

That’s enough self-disclosure for now, in fact for the next year or so; now I’ll turn to late bloomers more generally. We regard late bloomers as somewhat odd, they are not typically the popular kids in high school, they seem a little lost, often they are rather nerdy. In fact, to say that someone is a late bloomer is usually a nice way of saying they are sort of a loser.

But here’s a counter-intuitive spin on late bloomers: Rather than being slow to mature, maybe in fact they are actually ahead of their peers. Maybe they don’t fit in because it takes several years for their peers to catch up to them. Because if you think about it, the sorts of things that late bloomers don’t fit into are not exactly mature and adult behavior: an overwhelming concern with how you are seen by your peers, conformity to prevailing social norms, participation in fads, precocious sexuality, fanatic competition for position in the social hierarchy.

I don’t really mean to suggest that early or middle bloomers are immature, that’s a generalization that is surely unwarranted. But I’m interested in the fact that people kind of look down on late bloomers, which suggests that our cultural standards in fact encourage those behaviors I just mentioned in the previous paragraph, because when somebody doesn’t act this way he or she is considered a weirdo.

Now we’re back to something that I have often pointed out in this blog, the fact that our values are not always what we claim they are. Our society (and probably other societies as well) has a set of shadow values—behaviors that we officially we claim to deplore, but actually we do much to promote.

So why should our society encourage teen-agers to be highly conformist, obsessed with popularity and the latest fads, and to flaunt their developing sexuality? The reason is that these behaviors are in fact highly compatible with a culture based in entertainment and consumption, as ours is. Children who are very concerned with displaying how they are in touch with the latest trends are fabulous and dependable consumers, and their concerns drive the larger economy of trendiness. And children who are highly oriented to physical arousal are going to pursue it where they can find it, in drugs, entertainment and sex. The fact is that our social and economic system encourages a number of values and behaviors we claim to deplore. Our mild disdain for “late bloomers” is just one more example of this.

We live in a culture of entertainment, a society in which being entertained is so highly valued that at times it seems that if something isn’t entertaining, it should be avoided or ignored. The demand for just about everything to conform to the standards of entertainment has, in the last few decades, extended to the person. You have to be entertaining, or you will be avoided or ignored.

Therefore a small industry has arisen to help you develop your personal brand. As you know, big corporations spend millions to develop brands with flashy logos that encourage consumers to view the corporation and its products as exciting, cool, edgy, etc. Well,, if products need brands, why not individuals? Inevitably, “branding coaches” have started popping up offering advice on topics such as “Here’s what it takes to be the CEO of Me, Inc.” Most of the advice comes down to this: figure out your strengths and then figure out how to market them, thereby creating a public relations image for yourself.

This approach is generally oriented toward career management, but there is also a much larger (and somewhat harder to spot) process of self-branding going on in contemporary society. People have always used consumer products such as their cars and clothing to advertise who they are, but in recent years that process has accelerated. These days many high end houses are built not only to display the owner’s wealth, but also to assert claims about who the owner is: “I am the master of a Tuscan villa”, or “I am royalty” (I see lots of houses these days with turrets, which I suppose might be useful if you need to defend your house in a siege, otherwise they are just a way of saying, “I own a castle”).

Or , to take a different sort of example, I don’t listen to much country music, but I get to hear it sometimes at the gym, and these days it seems to me that a lot of it is about the sort of people who listen to country music: “I’m proud to drive a tractor and salute the flag” etc. Back in the day country music was about things like cheating spouses and drowning your sorrows at the bar; now a popular theme seems to be “I’m the sort of person who listens to country music.”—more self advertising. My final example is one that is so obvious it almost doesn’t need to be mentioned: social media. What is Facebook other than a vast platform for creating brand you?

Why do people feel they have to shout so loud to establish who they are? My answer would be: This happens for the same reason that movies get louder and brighter and more violent each decade: there’s a competition going on for people’s attention, and the competition will be won by whatever is the most stimulating. And increasingly that holds for people as well: people who are able to put together an impressive and eye-catching brand will be more likely to get noticed, get hired, be popular, etc.

I do have one question, however: What’s the difference between marketing yourself and simply being yourself?

Photo provided on flickr by austinevan.

Psychotherapy is such an important part of our way of life that one can forget that it’s a recent innovation. You will never see a character in a Jane Austen or Charles Dickens novel heading off for therapy, because therapy didn’t exist before the very late 19th century. Why not?

Some psychologists will argue that psychotherapy (like, say, chemistry) could only get going after some key scientific discoveries, but this is at best only part of the story. Psychotherapy emerged because of some important moral shifts in the late 19th century, shifts that also had something to do with the emergence of contemporary consumer society, advertising, and entertainment. When I say moral shifts, I am referring to matters like how people think about themselves and what they value in life.

The historian T.J. Jackson Lears sums up these matters by saying that around this time people began to develop a “therapeutic ethos.” By this he means that—compared to earlier ages–at this time people began to be very concerned about their physical and mental health, their well-being. In earlier, more religious, periods, questions like “are you getting all you can out of life?” and “are you happy?” were considered less important than questions about your state of salvation and your obligations to others. In fact, the idea that one should be maximizing one’s enjoyment and potential would have been absurd most people of 17th century.

However, throughout the 19th century the idea started to take hold that individual happiness and satisfaction was not only important, but in some ways the very purpose of life. People began to resonate with the notion that what was meaningful was not doing what society or God demanded, but rather finding and realizing the potential of their own unique selves. And as this inner self became important, taking care of it through various kinds of therapies became more important as well.

Why did these changes happen around this time? A full answer to that question would probably require a book, but notice that this is the period in which mass production techniques and other innovations began to create today’s consumer economy. The new moral attitudes encouraged consumption, because they stressed the importance of the individual’s happiness and fulfillment. It is especially important that this period also saw the spectacular growth of advertising and entertainments such as motion pictures.

Historians have pointed out that one of the most effective promoters of consumption was a new kind of advertising started to appear in this period: instead of providing information about the product, the new ads told the potential buyer that the product could transform his or her life. Strange, isn’t it: In a way, the ads were offering the same promises as the new science of psychotherapy, the possibility of personal transformation and a new level of satisfaction and happiness.

In pointing out this relationship between entertainment, advertising, and psychotherapy, am I saying that psychotherapy is unscientific? Absolutely not: a century of research has led to enormous advances and refinements in therapeutic techniques. But it’s best to remember where you came from, and back in the nursery it was a little more obvious who psychotherapy’s siblings and cousins were.

Photo by Dan Catchpole

You know what it’s like to have a crush on somebody, right? You can’t stop thinking about that somebody, you spend hours daydreaming about your future with them, your desire for that somebody is so overwhelming that it verges on the unbearable.

But have you thought about the fact that this is oddly similar to how you sometimes feel about certain desirable consumer products, from a guitar to an iPhone to a car? It’s like the somebody: you feel like your life will only be complete once you acquire the product, you long for it, you are certain that once you have it everything will finally fall into place.

Why should we have such similar fantasies about romantic partners and consumer goods? And I’ve got some more questions for you. So, let’s say that when you were in the 10th grade you developed a staggering crush on, I don’t know, Pat, and eventually you went out with Pat and learned that Pat was actually a boring asshole. You then gave up having crushes on people, right? Wrong! You have kept right on with the crush business, despite the fact that it has been demonstrated to you again and again that when you actually get the person or the product, it turns out to be a disappointment.

So , that’s my second question—can you name another area of life where we hang onto beliefs that are so thoroughly disconfirmed by our experience? Why is that we continue to believe that we’ve just got to have some person or some thing, when we should know perfectly well that it’s not going to change anything?

Third question: How come I know this about you? Psychologists sometimes study people’s fantasies, and the basic assumption is that a person’s fantasies will be related to their personality and biography. But I know nothing of your history or personality Here we have a fantasy that seems to be shared by nearly everybody in the society. What causes this?

You might think you know the answer to that one: This is just the way human beings are. Humans everywhere develop longings for what they don’t have: the grass is always greener over there, etc. Well, yes and no. Sure, all people develop desires for what they don’t have. On the other hand, these powerful longings that are never quite fulfilled may not be universal at all. Historians who have studied romantic crushes have typically concluded that they didn’t exist in earlier ages; after all, how much sense do crushes make in a society where any contact with the opposite sex has to be arranged by your parents? And most people haven’t had a lot of consumer goods to fantasize about.

This suggests that the odd behavior of crushes on people and stuff may be generated by our culture. And that would make some sense, because high consumption economies do not work if people are satisfied with what they have. For our economy to work, we always need to want what we don’t have. And, strangely enough, we do.

Photo by Lewis Minor

In a previous post I explained the basic principles of celebrity atheism: Sure, there are actual people who correspond in some sense to well-known celebrities such as Beyonce or Scarlett Johansson. However, what we encounter out here in the everyday world is usually not those actual people, rather we encounter highly scripted, airbrushed, and staged images that the actual people help to produce. The images are not the people; the images are, like the fictional characters in a film, symbols rather than physical beings.

Why does this matter? It matters in several ways, here’s one of them: Many Americans, whether or not they are explicit about the matter, consider celebrities to be role-models. They want to be like celebrities, or they want to actually be celebrities. Consider an article on Angelina Jolie that appeared in Harper’s Bazaar in earlier this summer. Based on polling data, the article asserts “women want to be with her and be her at the same time”

As we all know, this is hardly unusual: kids wear the jerseys of NBA players and practice their signature moves, fans adopt the clothing styles and favorite foods of the singers they idolize or choose their career paths based on their identification with celebrities. Sometimes critics suggest that certain celebrities are inappropriate role models because they take drugs, get arrested for battery, or whatever. But I’d like to suggest a more basic reason that celebrities aren’t good role models: they aren’t people.

Take the Angelina article I mentioned, written by Naomi Wolf. I’ve got nothing against Wolf (although some others do), she’s a smart writer with more readers than I can even dream of. But she’s a celebrity believer, or at least pretends to be one in order to get her writing published in Harper’s Weekly. She tells her readers that Jolie “for the first time in modern culture, brings together almost every aspect of female empowerment and liberation.”

Cool, way to go Angelina. Wolf goes on to tell us that Angelina has it all, she has Brad Pitt, first of all, but also she cares for “half a football team of children”, does good deeds, all the while looking like…Angelina Jolie. And in so doing she shows all women that they too can have it all.

I demur. Images can be made to look like they have it all, but people don’t. The person Angelina Jolie undoubtedly has disappointments, messes up, and doesn’t look like “Angelina Jolie” much of the time. But even more important than the fact that people don’t have it all is that people don’t need to have it all, and setting that up as a goal is a recipe for constant dissatisfaction. Be a celebrity atheist, give up on the conviction that celebrities prove there’s a perfect life out there, and focus instead on doing your best in an imperfect but also kind of remarkable world.

Waxy photo by DanieDVM

I know some things about your life, because I know some things about people in our society (including myself). I know that you (probably, there are always exceptions to generalizations) have a fantasy that things will be better for you when (1) you graduate (2) you get married (3) you get the promotion, or a better job (4) you pay off your student loans (4) you get a new laptop (5) Tom, the hunky guy, asks you out (6) etc.

Celebrities–the ones who have made it

If you are fortunate, as I am, you are healthy and have a family you love and an interesting job. But still things aren’t quite what they could be, are they? Real fulfillment is out there, but it’s just out of reach. You’re close, but not quite there. Things will be perfect when…

You know you are not quite there because you’ve seen real fulfillment. You see it in many places, but most strikingly in the lives of celebrities. Those are the folks who have finally made it, aren’t they? They can have whatever they want, they are surrounded by admirers, they can bask in the certainty that they are cool. But of course, sometimes they have addictions or relationship problems or sometimes they make fools of themselves, so it’s obvious that their lives are far from perfect.

Somehow, that doesn’t really matter, does it? It doesn’t matter because they did it, they made it to real fulfillment. Most of us aren’t quite sure of who we are or where we are going. But a celebrity knows where she is going because she’s there.

How do you ever know if you are all that you could be?

Of course, that’s not actually true, I’m sure that celebrities are miserable in at least the same proportion as the rest of the population. But at the same time I, and you (probably) can’t really shake the genuine conviction that celebrities have it made. Back to doublethink  again.

A simple test: If your fairy godmother appeared and offered to make you famous. can you honestly maintain you’d say “no thanks?” The reason you’d take her up on it is that you know that if you were famous you would have achieved what you, and all of us in this society, believe to be the very purpose of life: you would have fulfilled your destiny. Finally, that nagging feeling about being one step away from happiness would go away, because you would have taken that last step.

We’re supposed to be all that we can be, and famous people are the only ones who can be sure they did. And that’s why in all probability you can’t really put aside your feelings about celebrities, your secret fascination with Brad and Angelina. In your heart you know—not believe—that they have done what it is the bedrock purpose of our lives to do, they have attained our version of perfection. Celebrities offer us the most awe-inspiring of possibilities: to actually behold perfection here in this flawed world.

This post first appeared on my blog “Sex, Drugs, and Boredom” at Psychology Today.

There are people who care about Brad and Angelina, and they admit it. They devour whatever information they can find on Brad and Angelina, they discuss B and A with their friends, etc. And, there undoubtedly are people who really, honestly, don’t care about Brad and Angelina. Finally, there’s a third (very large) group, the people I want to talk about here: People who don’t admit to themselves or others that they care about Brad and Angelina, but who would actually be thrilled if Brad or Angelina were to, say, call them up just to chat. In all likelihood, you, reader, are a member of this third group.

So, why do you have such contradictory ideas about these celebrities?

If you aren’t curious about this, you really should be. This is a great example of something we don’t pay much attention to: believing something and not believing it at the same time, and it’s right there in your own mind. This is pretty much what George Orwell called doublethink, the capacity to hold two contradictory propositions in your mind and not bother much about the contradiction.For Orwell, doublethink wasn’t a good sign. In his novel 1984, doublethink occurs as people abandon their ability to think independently. Doublethink is an indication that you are willing to deny what you know to be true.

Of course, there is no Big Brother

I’m not saying that entertainment is a conspiracy to manipulate you. But it is curious to think about the fact that, say, you dislike violence but love to watch it on television shows. You know that happiness does not reliably follow from possessions, but there are a lot of things that you would really, really like to possess. You know that stable relationships are based not on fantasies but on things like trust and problem-solving skills, but you also regularly fall into wild romantic yearnings for people you know at best slightly. But none of these contradictions matter, though, do they? People can watch some TV, buy that convertible, develop a crush on their tennis instructor, what’s the harm?

Well, I suppose that to the extent we do not understand our own values, we might find our lives somewhat unfulfilling. And I guess it is true that sometimes those crushes do lead to painful messes, even broken families. And, come to think of it, this barely scratches the surface of the ways in which people in the most prosperous and comfortable situation in human history often seem confused and discontented. So, maybe it does matter in some way…I’m sorry, I’ve wandered from Brad and Angelina. Next time, I promise.

This is a lightly edited version of a post that first appeared on Sex, Drugs, and Boredom, my blog at Psychology Today.