idols – Anna Down South

Instagram influencers. Political influencers. Bloggers even.

If you scan the internet it seems that people aren’t just sharing their lives with you, but they’re trying to get you to live more like them. Whether it’s by changing your lifestyle, buying brands, or changing your opinions, there are a lot of people who want you to change. Maybe they want to be the standard that you’re reaching for, maybe they just like the fame. Whatever the case, the people who are trying hard to influence and be role models… they’re not normally the people you should aspire to be.

The best role models are ones that guide you through life. Their values are set and admirable and their life, despite it’s struggles, has joy in it on a really fundamental level. The best role models are moral ones. They are the content ones. And they are the ones we’d still like to be like when they are in their seventies. Good role models aren’t hard to find, despite what people say, there are a lot of good people in this world. Of course no one is perfect, but a good role model doesn’t pretend to be. They wear their flaws and they work on bettering them.

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I feel like I’ve watched hundreds of celebrities fall from grace recently. It’s empowering to watch bad people exit stage left, but watching how torn up people have been over their favorites falling has led me back to something I haven’t spent much time thinking about since a group of my friends were neck deep into the One Direction fandom years ago.

Hint: It’s about celebrity worship.

There is nothing wrong with liking a celebrity. There is nothing wrong with loving their work and buying every album or movie the moment it comes out. What’s concerning is when celebrities pass “my favorite _____”, then pass “my role model”, and land in “my idol”.

Idols are problematic in general, from a religious standpoint, but they’re problematic without that take too. People have hold their favorite celebrities up as untouchable. Anything they do wrong is immediately dismissed. They are to be imitated. They are to be worshiped as gods among us.

It doesn’t seem like that big of a concern most the time, because I’m not around it much. I’m an adult. We grow out of these stages, or at least, most of us do. We shake it off and move on with our lives. However, there are times when I fall into the depths of Twitter or Tumblr and I find out that the worlds teenagers are spending their youth obsessing with other’s lives on social media. They’re making blogs for them. They’re posting daily pictures of them. They know what hotel they are staying at tonight. And it’s absolutely toxic for them.

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