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The escape from mundane lives attracts many to famous for being famous, but that is a reality for a select few and not in the future of those who fantasize. Those in government must escape that mentality and govern for betterment of the nation, not their own egos. We don't need rock star governance. We the public shouldn't care that a politician appeared at a music festival, partied with Stevie Nicks backstage at geriatric rock concert featuring Fleetwood Mac, or danced all night to a borrowed theme song for a politician without permission of the composer of the song on an endless loop. Yet the mob, the public, has always been fickle. The Just Men misjudged the Mob and assassinated Caesar leading to their own destruction. Our politicians refuse to learn from history and only throw bread to the crowds, not bakeries. Once the bread is eaten, it is forgotten, and only more free loaves keep them empowered. You are right to lay blame on the public, but then leadership, real leadership can alter that equation. We have witnessed such in times of crisis, now we need it to prevent crisis we can control with the right actions. Will we recognize when it appears? I hope so, but don't know. I cannot predict the future, as hard as I try.
Let me preface the following by saying I don't understand the "famous for being famous" thing, not existentially or conceptually, as it applies to Americans. I can relate to it for royals in monarchies. A prince is famous before he's born; he's born and he's still famous; he mostly does nothing for the first ~20 years of his life and he's still famous. Maybe there's some countably-small number of Americans who are like that, but there can't be that many. Americans have to do something on their own to gain their fame; it needn't always be something monumental, but it's gotta be something.
Red:
Escaping from mundanity appeals to everyone, mainly because, for the most part, literally everyone's life is mundane.
What do you when you want to escape your mundane life?
When I want to escape mine, I don't stuff I normally don't do. What I don't do is look at someone else's life to see what they're doing. Sorry, but I cannot vicariously divest my life of its mundanity. Furthermore, I happen to like much of the routine/dull stuff that happens in my daily existence. Indeed, I structured my life so I can do those things. The "boring stuff" one does all the time is the stuff of life. The escapes are just occasional diversions, but they're not what I'd want to do every day.
I wonder if you may mean something along the lines of a theme I broached in another thread (
post 80). That post has escapism as an tacit theme, but I didn't go there. My thoughts when I wrote that post had to do with the "green monster" rather than the bizarre approach to self-actualization that you've depicted as folks' aiming to escape mundanity.
That notwithstanding, yes, people do need to get over their fascination with celebs, be it political, social, business, science or entertainment celebs. Once one gets off one's sorry ass and does things, one'll find one hardly has time to pay any mind to celebs. By my reckoning, the only folks who have any justification for bothering with the irrelevant things celebs do/say are folks who've reached the point of sustaining themselves sans a job.
Think to, say, the Gilded Age. The DuPonts, Astors, Mellons, Carnegies, Vanderbilts, etc. didn't have a damn thing else to do but talk about one another and other folks. Their gossip thus was how they escaped the doldrums of their own existence. These days, however, as a child and a non-working retiree one can be that way. For the remainder of one's life, almost nobody has such a dull life that they should too have time to direct their focus toward other folks' BS.
Hell, take a walk into one's own yard and turn over stones to see what's there. It's not hard to break the blase-blase of life.
