Mollari

I am sorry to say that I intimately understand what it is to have a parasocial relationship with a celebrity. Just like any normal teenage girl, I had rotating crushes on famous men. When I was a kid, I actually developed a crush on the Spiderman cartoon. Later on, it was Ricardo Montalbán, the guy who played the host on the TV series Fantasy Island. Though I never had a thing for either of the two Coreys (Haim or Feldman), there were plenty of other Teen Beat actors and singers I idolized, and that was just the beginning. 

When you have an emptiness in your life and it causes a great deal of emotional pain, parasocial relationships are very seductive. When you are unfulfilled and disenchanted by normalcy and constantly suspect it will never make you happy, a parasocial relationship is a convenient placeholder and a way to put off meaningful relationships. Delayed gratification becomes gratifying in itself, and the retreat into a fantasy island where the perfect mate awaits with a bouquet of roses and zero expectations, attachments, or responsibilities is the path of least resistance. Real relationships are both boring and dramatic in a way that parasocial relationships are not. Ennui and a continued lowering of standards mar the long-term love relationship as both partners age and inevitably evolve towards different interests than white hot passion -- unless one is a celebrity, we usually do not get more physically attractive with each passing year. To put it more simply, aging is not pretty and people are shallow. Men and women both leave relationships for greener and younger pastures when the going gets tough because the guy loses his job or the wife starts looking a great deal like her mother. The parasocial relationship suffers no such handicaps.

They dream of Hogwarts

One of the saddest things I have ever seen online is entire groups of people who convince themselves they can and should slide through fictional worlds by . . . napping. The practice of "shifting" or "reality shifting" is part mental role play and part obsessive fan fiction. To shift, you first must choose a source material: usually a major franchise such as Harry Potter or Marvel. You then compose or write a script for yourself as if you are playing yourself in the desired world. The last step is to use meditation or lucid dreaming and conjure the desired world around you, completely supplanting your own mundane experience with the preferred milieu.

Shifting into Hogwarts presumes that one can daydream oneself into a part of the time-space continuum that is composed of J.K. Rowling's most famous characters doing their business as if the series played somewhere in an endless loop. Shifters report meeting Harry, Hermione, Dumbledore, and Snape. The cringiest shift while filming themselves while lying supine in bed, yelping if they have to jump out of the way of a runaway quidditch and spouting spontaneous Temu Latin limericks in imaginary Herbology classes.

Many shifters become depressed, counting the minutes spent in crappy, low-paid jobs, hellish schools, and dismal normie life and try to permashift into the fantasy world. The fantasy world is always the full Mary Sue/Marty Stu Revue where the shifter becomes the perfect hero of her custom-tailored story. Privation, pain, and suffering is off the table during shifts; instead, it is a deluxe, all-inclusive spa for the mind. Though pre-fab worlds are preferred venues, many travel to idealized pasts, like 1980s shopping malls or Regency era Britain. Some go as far to report that they have had children in alternate timelines. Again, nothing is off the table . . . except confronting one's own shadow. Pretending everything is absolutely wonderful carries a price. Depression about the provisional lifestyle of shifting is so bad, Reddit has a thread on r/shiftingrealities warning about coded talk about suicide and self-harm. 

When I was a teen, I tried to shift into an alternate timeline/reality. I tried to convince myself that the back of my piano could be entered like a Narnian portal and that it would plop me down in my dearest Waverly romantasy where I could be swept away by a shining knight or cunning archmage. Even though this world was based on the Dark Ages, somehow everyone in it bathed (not sure how they found indoor plumbing in winter) and I was able to see without contacts or glasses. In real life, my eyeglasses resemble the bottoms of old Coke bottles. Details aside, the general sentiment was the same as the modern shifter's: Anywhere is better than here, any time is better than now. 

Back in the day, girls were in love with David Cassidy. Before him, it was The Beatles. Before them, it was Elvis. Before him, girls threw fits over Frank Sinatra. Before him, women went ape for Rasputin. Before him, it was Lord Byron, who received multiple gifts of pubic hair from his number one (married) stalker and paramour, Lady Caroline Lamb, and also got some pubes from Italian countess Teresa Guiccioli. 

Women and girls are not the only ones who go nuts over celebrities, and in recent years especially, boys and men have joined the fray of parasocial hysterics. They are often right there next to their female counterparts at the Taylor Swift concert.

Yeah, I had to mention her. Taylor Swift is not the worst songwriter or musician I have ever heard. To be intellectually honest, some of her songs are pretty good. Her voice is neither great nor terrible. Taylor Swift calls herself "only ever a 4" on the looks scale in her latest song, Cleveland!, which is more of her usual male-centered pablum. She also admits she is completely insufferable, which is almost funny, but she does not say it directly. She may be insufferable; she looks fine. Taylor Swift does well in beautiful gowns as Aretha Franklin once noted, and she is at least an 8.5 if you are into tall blonds and can get past her uncanny resemblance to Napoleon Dynamite. Her music and voice are actually the problem, as they have always been a solid 4, yet until recently has always been billed as a genius 10.
 
The Asians are not OK

Terminally Drifting wrote a banger of an article on Chinese dating and the convoluted labyrinth of marriage in a society that aborted its way to a current surplus of 30 million men and not nearly enough women. The result has been a top-heavy mushroom of a population where 4 out of any 10 people will be elderly in 2050. Korea and Japan are in similar demographic pickles, and though they are not as male-heavy as China, they have been afflicted with population busts that often strain the few working people to literal death.

Conformity as psychosis plays itself out in Asian pop, which pushes increasingly impossible beauty standards. Beauty is crafted into addiction in South Korea and has made it into the plastic surgery capital of the world. Nearly 1 in 4 South Korean women between the ages of 25-35 have had cosmetic surgery (at the time of this writing) according to a Statista survey of 1500 people. It is also estimated that 30 percent of men of the same age group have opted for at least one cosmetic procedure. The driver of this economic engine is K-pop.

K-pop has been around since the 1990s, and if you are familiar with the Backstreet Boys, N Sync, or the Spice Girls, the model is the same: they are bands fabricated by labels and management companies. The K-pop trainee starts young, often before his or her teens, and is chosen for malleability and attractiveness. K-pop stars are then molded, tortured, put through surgeries and diets, and the end result is a bunch of clones who lend credibility to the "they all look alike" racial epithet that is often hurled at Asians. 

K-pop is an industry dedicated to breeding conformity. The K-pop star conforms to a beauty standard that is created for her by a group of executives who make her in the image they believe the public wants, and the public responds by making themselves into the image of the K-pop star. K-pop stars are ultra-thin, forced to starve or to be kicked out of the regime. Their behavior is policed until they become the personality version of fast food. The now-despised cartoon movie KPop Demon Hunters featured tall, skeletal heroines that made Barbie look short and stocky. For a country so beset with short people, the Korean obsession with height is Sisyphean. 

China is all about livestreaming and AI filters, and it inundates its popular media with suspiciously white-looking, tall, busty women who look like dark-haired, starving, half-Scottish space aliens. The easy availability of plastic surgery procedures has created a feedback loop where the Chinese women who are naive and young enough to give a crap what boys think are morphing themselves into creepy hapa Wednesday dolls. Again, the ideal is tall and skeletal -- some filters make their subjects look like they are suffering from giantism. The general rebellion against being a shortie is well underway, and along with it, there is an ongoing fight with the mono-lidded eye, naturally small breasts, flat noses, and tawny skin. We cannot have onlooker suspecting that at least half of the subject's ancestors did not come from the pallid-fleshed UK! 

Influencing is a full time job

The never-ending recession and soft depression we are in has generated its own psychosis in the West, and that is the sickness of wanting to be an influencer. According to a survey of 1000 Gen Zs by morningconsult.com, 57 percent said they wanted to be influencers. The perpetual Show & Tell of influencing is not lucrative -- very few break $15,000 a year. As a micro-influencer myself, I can assure you that I am keeping my day job.

Influencing is hard work, especially if it is the kind that is lucrative. An influencer becomes their own multimedia company, generating and pushing out content in the form of images, sounds, and publicity, and if they stop the flow for more than a few hours, they run the risk of becoming irrelevant and swallowed up by the copious competition.

Influencers are wannabe cult leaders, and running your own DIY cult sucks up plenty of time and energy.
They cannot live their lives without being obligated to document it. Every part of their existence becomes brand courtship and content creation. They also cannot show their ugly. Being an influencer means being all false transcendence, all the time. Many lifestyle influencers rent fancy clothes, bags, cars, and actual mansions in order to pretend they have more money than debt. Their fraud is not confined to AI tune ups of their faces and environments, at least for now.

Furthermore, there are influencers that are entirely AI with bogus backstories and ethnic origins. You cannot win. Whether real or fake, every last influencer is designed to trick you and your loved ones into buying crap you don't need and enriching a CEO in a penthouse who nobody likes. The hope and the dream is yet another iteration of something for nothing and playing the gee-tar on the MTV -- being famous because other people watch you play video games, being famous for remodeling your house, being famous for looking rich and hot, being famous for having a nice ass. And don't get me started on Instagram "models". Almost all modeling is human trafficking. Insta and OnlyFans are two easy ways to end up as a Dubai Porta Potty. Don't look up that term if you want to sleep tonight.

They don't care about you . . . thank the gods

The parasocial relationship is one-sided. Celebrities and influencers usually do not end up with their fans as lovers or as friends. Generally, they don't give a crap whether their fans live or die, or they simply cannot. Dolly Parton created Dollywood ostensibly for her fans to have a piece of her just as Graceland was supposed to give fans a piece of Elvis Presley. No matter what the intentions of Dollywood were, there was no way Dolly could be friends with all her fans.

Michael Jackson drew many to his own personal compounds which included Neverland Ranch, and he proved that bringing a parasocial relationship with a celebrity into real life could result in a worst-case outcome. As I argued in my dissection of the pop star, Jackson exhibited a destructive pattern with mostly young boys and a few young girls.

Whether or not he diddled his young friends, Jackson had a serialized habit of entering the life of a young fan, becoming his or her best friend, mentor, older brother, and father figure, plying him and his family with promises and gifts, and then brutally exiting when that child passed out of puberty into adulthood. He did it famously with Sean Lennon and Macaulay Culkin and less famously with dozens of semi-unknown and unknown boys. Jackson left broken young adults in his wake who struggled with substances and suicidal ideation. He wrecked entire families. He most likely drove the father of one of his little buddies to suicide by "inspiring" the mother to divorce. There is no doubt that Jackson encouraged and facilitated the overseas moves of multiple children at various times so they could become his emotional support humans. 

In the 1970s, Steven Tyler, who was near 30 at the time, seduced a young girl who had recently lost her brother in a tragic car crash. The girl, Julia Holcomb, was 16 when she met Tyler at one of his concerts. Tyler later adopted Holcomb as his ersatz daughter, having her mother sign over papers so he could be with her all the time. When Holcomb became pregnant 3 years later, Tyler coerced and badgered her into having a dangerous, late term abortion. He blamed her for starting a house fire that it is highly unlikely she caused and used it as an excuse to abort their baby son. She is currently suing him. 

The moral of these stories is that sometimes the worst thing that can happen is your parasocial wish coming true.
 
Perez Hilton, parasocial parasite

Bless you if you have no idea who Perez Hilton is or why his name borrows the mojo of a hook-nosed hotel heiress who was once known for a sleepy sex tape and a spray tan. People like you are the reason why the world is still sane. Perez Hilton was one of the first gossip bloggers. He took over where the tabloids left off, trashing celebrities for a living. He personally made Lindsay Lohan's life a living hell during his early 2000s reign of terror. He viciously picked on Britney Spears, telling her in no uncertain terms to kill herself on multiple occasions. He published explicit underskirt photos of Miley Cyrus when she was still a minor. Though he earned his living from the suffering of starlets, he was oddly connected to them, and he was often photographed behind the scenes canoodling with his namesake, Paris Hilton, and other shady figures with whom he supposedly had a hate/hate relationship. He often hung with the Kardashians, raising many questions about controlled opposition. 

Perez Hilton's blog was popular enough to make him somewhat of a household name. He has now fallen into near-obscurity. His latest stunt was to cut himself up with a blade during a TikTok live. The mental health episode lasted at least 30 minutes as he self-mutilated. Oddly, TikTok did not take it down for the duration of the bloody show. Perhaps he has some regrets. I think it is more likely he regrets not getting much attention. 

Perez Hilton was not beautiful or interesting enough to be a celebrity in this life, so he took the dastardly low road of abusing and slandering the women he wanted to be in order to make a name for himself. He was the ultimate parasocial bully, playing to the evilest perversions of human nature and spreading his malaise across the internet.
May he and his handlers rot quietly in the hell of their own creation for as long as it takes, and may his adopted children be saved from the consequences of his stupidity at every turn.

Groupies

Back in the day, it was a rite of passage for a 14 year old girl to sneak backstage at a rock concert. A chance meeting with the band was worth many extra points if you managed to give the singer or the instrumentalists a handy, a BJ, or the full Friskies platter. There were girls who did this semi-professionally. I knew one of them. Her goal in life was to become intimate with band members, and this was probably because she had been regularly sexually abused and groomed by her father since the age of 4. Her reasoning was probably "Why should I save up what my father takes for free?"

The Grateful Dead had its own traveling community of deadheads, and that community was its own self-contained culture and economy. Deadheads came to a dead end when Jerry died and the band with it, with the remnants flying off to worship other hippie bands and to trade venereal diseases at the annual Rainbow Gathering. 
Groupies don't follow and stalk offline like they used to. Instead they reality shift and play-pretend that they are dallying with their favorite celebrities in slightly alternate timelines. I am not sure if this is a good or bad development. 

Taking the stars and wool out of our eyes

I hope that the changes I am seeing are heralding the end of parasocial relationships. It is time. We are no longer in the Age of Pisces -- there is no one God to rule them all, nor a single image that can dominate all minds. We are all going our own Aquarian ways, doing our own things. 

The pendulum has swung heavily since the turn of the millennium. Hating celebrities was simply not done 40 years ago like it is done today. You either followed celebrity culture or you didn't in 1987 -- openly hating on the rich and famous and their lifestyles did not happen, and gossip rags like the National Enquirer and Star still took a reverent, genuflecting attitude towards Hollywood right up until Perez Hilton. Hating celebrities has been a sport for a considerable amount of time, and we have now arrived at an era where it is also open season on those who are still taken in by celebrity glamour and other CIA psyops. 

Perhaps instead of envy, hatred, and lust, we can relearn an innocent admiration for pretty, talented, skilled people that considers them as part of a huge spectrum of possibilities and that does not seek to be them or be with them. The sickening truth is that the desire to enter the heady world of celebrity often begins with a parasocial relationship, not a genuine desire to express one's unique talents or to find one's artistic niche. Yet we have always had the choice of picking what we admire about a celebrity or influencer and leaving ambition entirely out of it. We can say "Wow, that's cool" and move on. Imagining a romantic relationship with a famous stranger is normal and human; consummating that relationship, however, is not likely to end well.

To those embroiled in parasocial relationships: please try to understand that the person that is presented to you is the figment of his handler's imagination. He is a product. All of the ego-shine you are seeing and the magnification of specialness likely houses a narcissist jerk who has probably been to Epstein island. 

You have zero friends

The parasocial relationship is a relationship to avoid, and to avoid it, we must be okay with occasionally having zero friends. There are nearly 8 billion people on this planet and finding an emotional connection with another human has never been harder. The answer is not a parasocial relationship. Instead, it is to learn to be with yourself and to accept yourself for what you are, no matter how bad that is. Falling in love with someone on the big stage and screen is a distraction from learning about yourself, examining your problems in meditation, and ruminating about them one at a time until there are far fewer of them amassing to overwhelm you.

The last thing you need is to project a fantasy on someone who does not and cannot care about you. They will never know you, and that is probably their loss. We have to start thinking for ourselves and not put ourselves at the mercy of influences that are planted in us. Evil corporations and anti-human governments that farm us for money and energy are depending upon our gullible love for the people-products they shove down our throats. Don't put your energy into the narcissist at the end of the rainbow -- being a narcissist is practically a requirement when it comes to becoming a celebrity.

Find it within yourself to be cool with yourself. The funny thing about being cool with being alone is you become fascinating to others at the exact moment you do not need to be fascinating to anyone. When you have no need of love, it will throw itself at you. More on that later.