You can’t turn on the television or visit any sort of website to find out what is going on anymore without being inundated with news about the latest goings on of the various celebrities; and this is having a very detrimental impact on our society.

The biggest and likely worst impact of this celebrity worship is what it’s doing to growing children. Growing up with such an abundance of news about celebrities gives kids a skewed sense of what the rest of the world considers to be important, and it causes them to feel as if they need to be like a celebrity to matter. This is unhealthy for them because celebrities inhabit a world that others cannot hope to emulate. It’s also unhealthy in that it causes kids to feel like their own individual personalities or attributes are without worth, which of course winds up causing them to feel worthless. When you combine this with the unrealistic expectations that young minds can develop when considering goals for their own future when basing it on a desire to be a celebrity themselves, especially when they see that a special talent is no longer a requirement, there is a concern that as these kids mature and begin to realize that their dreams likely will never come true, they will become listless and lost and very unhappy adults.

That appears to be exactly what is happening for a lot of kids.

Another way that celebrity worship is wreaking havoc on our society is on interpersonal relationships. More and more people are comparing what they see in their lives against those of people they don’t even know - people that exist for them only on the movie screen or in the tabloid pages. This is unhealthy for two reasons. The first is that it’s an unfair match; people in real life cannot possibly ever measure up to the airbrushed or carefully directed images of those they see only on their best days. The second is that because of the explosion of news that accompanies even the smallest of acts by a celebrity, people come to see them as important - sometimes more important than people that are actually in their lives. In such cases, people may find it difficult, if not impossible, to put their husband or wife or boyfriend or girlfriend first, especially if they are secretly wishing they were more like a certain idol.

Finally, celebrity worship itself has historically been a sign of impending societal collapse; from the Romans to the Russians and early European dynasties, idol worship has been the death knell, and it appears we are now following that very same path.