Episode 30: Hollywood Tricks Us Into Thinking Crazy People are Normal

[00:00:00] Seth: Making it into Hollywood is no small thing. Whether you want to be a singer or an actor or actress, you need to know someone, or already be famous from something else, or incredibly talented in some particular thing. Or you just have to work really, really hard to network and meet the right people. Or, have a parent work really, really hard to get you in.

Even then, you may never be more than just a B list actor, if that. Not to mention, that you have to be pretty good at acting. Then, once you're in, you are judged literally every single day based on how you look and how you act. Who you are is not valued so much as how well you pretend to be somebody else, or how well you represent someone's ideal dream.

And in order to keep up with the movers and shakers in that business, you need to be around them as much as possible, which may mean that you have to go to a lot of parties. You gotta stay up late. You gotta do whatever things those people are doing. And as we found out a few years ago, or rather had it confirmed to us, if you're a woman, especially, you may even need to sleep with the right people to get in, if you want the upper hand.

And even if you do, you still may never get into that picture. So it's an industry that inherently cares nothing for your value as a person, but purely for your value as an object of fantasy. Even the people that were put into Hollywood by their parents, who may have otherwise ended up as stable adults, Get just as messed up as the people who voluntarily choose to pursue that life, if not worse.

I just don't see how a stable grounded person could ever make it in Hollywood. Hollywood tricks us into thinking crazy people are normal. Not to say that people from Hollywood are never stable, but if they are it seems like it happens later in life. If ever, when they've got one foot out the door, maybe it's possible that somehow they managed to never have both feet in in the first place, but I'm not sure how that would be possible considering the environment that they have to work through just to get famous.

So it really bothers me that we so easily idolize these people. It's like we want to buy into this lie that they sell on the screen, and as if we want to pretend that these people are the people that they are pretending to be. But they're just people. I mean, sometimes they're extraordinary people, but they're still just people.

And they're often deeply, deeply flawed ones. Now, to be fair to Hollywood, I don't know. I have never experienced Hollywood. I never aspired to be an actor, never aspired to be a singer, never even touched that world. But I've known a few people that you might say dabbled on the edge of Hollywood, but it's really an industry that I know nothing about personally.

That being said, it also happens to be the most publicized industry So I feel at the very least I have enough information to make some observations. And something I've thought about in particular is the kind of counterfeit relationship that superstars probably experience with their fans. I've read or watched a few of these stars describe this beautiful relationship they have with their fans.

And in a way, it makes sense that an actor or singer would feel this way, as those fans are who they dedicate their time to making happy. And in a very real way, they do have a relationship with their fans, who, in turn, shower them with adoration and money. But what feels so false about it is that the singer or the actor puts real time and effort into making these fans happy, while the fans are really just there for the ride.

So, they have these platforms to reach hundreds or thousands of people, but the relationship is relatively shallow and superficial and kind of one sided, because the person that's experienced all of the deep feeling is the singer or the actor, and everybody else is just enjoying the music. And granted, I'm sure a lot of them admire that singer or actor, but it just doesn't go that deep.

So, for all of the fans that Taylor Swift has. The only ones that probably have any truly deep affection for her are probably crazy. And everybody else just enjoys her music. When people see their favorite singers or actors, they don't really see those people for who they are, but rather they see the version that's being presented to them, or maybe they see a version of themselves that they like.

So the love and adoration received by your typical pop singer and actor isn't really love and adoration for those people, but rather love and adoration for an ideal or a dream. Maybe just a love of the environment that's being created by that person, but it's not really about that person. So I believe some of these famous people feel like they actually have a deep connection with their thousands of followers but it's just simply not possible except for maybe with a handful of fanatics and even the fanatics who have these unhealthy obsessions, that obsession doesn't necessarily come from a sincere place of adoration, but more likely an empty place inside of them that's driving that obsession.

So famous people I think get a kind of high off of this attention And they're constantly tricked into thinking that they've got this relationship with their fans, all the while becoming surrounded by more and more fanatics and social strategists that are not even healthy people to be around. It's no wonder they feel so lost, so often, because they hardly have anyone real in their lifetime.

Help them stay sane. I mean, how could you, you'd be constantly surrounded by fanatics and social strategists. Maybe there's a few real people thrown into the mix, but it'd be hard to keep them straight. So I imagine that these actors and singers experienced the social equivalent of having the oxygen slowly reduced in their air without them realizing it until they get dizzy and pass out.

I mean, what would it be like to feel like you have sincere and meaningful relationships? When in truth, the majority of them are actually superficial. It's no wonder these famous actors and singers so often tend to marry other famous actors and singers. Because at least if they marry another famous person, you know they're not as likely to be using you for their own advancement or bragging rights.

I think of the Beatles sometimes. So these guys generally had really terrible lives, but I think they represented something to people. I mean clearly some of their songs really resonate with a lot of us, but 60 years later we still treat these guys like the gods of music. But no one seems to truly appreciate their lives or who they are.

Other than maybe the idea that to make good music, you have to be a tortured soul. People only care about their music. It could have been written by entirely different people. And those people would have been deified just the same. So the curse of being famous seems to be that Everyone knows you, while at the same time, nobody does.

And that seems like a sad existence to me. I wonder how a person in their situation would even go about trying to develop a healthy social circle. You would almost have to surround yourself with other famous people, but if you do that, then you've just surrounded yourself with a cohort of people that are likewise surrounded by sycophants, and maybe just as screwed up as you are.

So I don't know if it's even possible to stay grounded in a world like that, but the part that kills me is that these people serve as examples to the rest of us. You see, for most normal people, we have the people we know within our social circle, and then we have the people that we see on TV, or movies, or the news, that represent what the world's like outside of our own social bubble.

I mean, some of these stars, That we see so frequently, almost begin to feel like an acquaintance to us, because we've seen them so often. But, we don't actually know them, because we only know the persona that they project. Now, I feel a deep connection to certain characters and stories I like. For example, I've said it in other episodes, but, I love Aragorn and Sam from The Lord of the Rings.

I also love the character Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind. I love Cool Hand Luke, who is played by Paul Newman. And by extension, the actors that play those characters would probably cause me to feel some amount of connection that I felt with the characters to transfer over to them, since they have the faces that I associate with those beloved characters.

But they're not the characters that they play. As good as they may be in real life, I don't have a connection with them, because I don't even know them. As mere mortals, it's hard for us to distinguish between fantasy and reality. And sometimes we allow the people that play the characters to bask in some of that glory, whether or not it's deserved.

So knowing how susceptible we are to this, I think it's important to keep those people off the pedestal. That we seem so determined to keep them on. Because generally speaking, these people are a terrible representation of a healthy life. Now having said all of this and talking about how screwed up these people's lives are, the real problem now becomes, how do we find people that represent healthy living?

I imagine that they're not likely to be famous if you manage to find one and finding good people that deserve to sit on a pedestal is tricky because most likely if you put them on a pedestal, they're going to do their best to get off of it. So the best I can tell is that these are the people who maintain some perspective when things get hard.

These are the kind of people that are able to get excited over some of the simple things in life. They're the people that have found how to be content. And the people that pursue goodness as best as they're able, they are the people that would sooner spend their time helping a friend in need than seeking their next thrill.

These are the people in real life that if thrust into a storybook would be the characters that the actors in Hollywood pretend to be. So maybe the next time you see a tabloid, try to think of someone who actually has a life worth emulating.