Rebuilding Rob

As WordPress continues to recycle old prompts, I pulled another prompt from The Coffee Monsterz Co to respond to today

Do you enjoy celebrity gossip?

I can’t stand celebrity gossip. To be honest, I really don’t care what celebrities are doing, for the most part. I see those TV shows like access Hollywood, TMZ, and magazines like people, and they all completely perpetuate the whole paparazzi photographer thing.

When Princess Diana died back in 1997, the car accident that she was in was largely placed on paparazzi photographers who were chasing her car nonstop through the streets of London. In a moment of hopeless naïvety, I remember thinking that maybe we as people would collectively stop worshipping worshipping celebrities so much – since when it was that very obsession with them that led to Diana‘s death.

But even more than I despise celebrity gossip, I despise celebrities in general. We live in a culture that is absolutely obsessed with celebrities. We worship them. They are our idols. Maybe not all of us, but humanity collectively worships celebrities.

I’m not a big traveler, but I have been in New York City twice. I also spent a brief few days in Los Angeles. I happen to be outside the TCL Chinese Theater (at the time, Mann’s Chinese Theater) for the world premiere of Lethal Weapon 4. At this point, I hadn’t seen any of the Lethal Weapon movies, although I was familiar with the franchise. I was standing pretty far back in the crowd, and I could hear people just being absolutely starstruck around me “oh they’re so and so…“.

I talk about being annoyed by celebrities, and out there I was, standing out in front of the Chinese theater during the world premiere of a major motion picture. Admittedly, I was mostly doing it just because I was in town for a few days and it was an event that was going on within walking distance of my hotel.

Unlike Los Angeles, I always got the vibe that people in New York City are just too self-absorbed or preoccupied to be interested in celebrities who are around them, or seeing a TV show or movie being filmed in their proximity. Maybe part of that is because there are a lot of celebrities who live in New York City. Maybe New Yorkers are just used to seeing them out and about.

They are useless

I know I’ve talked about this before another posts, but one of the lessons that I hope people took with them from COVID-19 and the global lockdowns that followed was how utterly useless celebrities are in a real emergency. When things really got bad, grocery store, retail, and service employees were elevated to first responder status along with police, fire, EMT, doctors and, dare I say,teachers.

Where were the high and mighty celebrities in? They were at home, doing nothing. Because I really don’t contribute much of anything to the world. Sure, they entertain us, but they make up seen amount of money for it. We act like we know them, because we see them on TV or in movies. But the truth is, we know nothing about their real lives. I think even most of the celebrity gossip is incredibly contrived just to make us think that they’re liking everybody else.

Wow, that really turned into a rant!

Thanks for stopping by Rebuilding Rob. Be sure to like, 👍 comment and subscribe to my blog below. It’s greatly appreciated! Also, feel free to follow me on social media as well! Check out my most recent posts as well as some earlier, related posts

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• Life is What Happens: A Look Back at My Non-Existent 2025 Vision
• The Moment I Walked Inside a Hallmark Movie

The article “False Idols” first appeared on Rebuilding Rob.