GenQ

I spend a lot of time thinking about what other people think, how other people function in the world. Todays news of Owen Wilson possibly attempting suicide has made me question this fascination of humans to ogle at the traumas and tragedies of life. Why is it that when we see a car accident, we, however altruistic, try to see what’s happened, how many people have been hurt, the car that is most damaged? Why do we all look for these things? The article on Owen Wilson is the second most read on the entire Sydney Morning Herald site! This, to me says something about human nature.

I will put my hand up and say that I do read gossip magazines, although I don’t generally go and buy them. However, I do get caught up with the lives of those that I watch in the movies, listen to, read etc. I want to know the scandals, who is with so and so. I have my favourites, who I watch out for. Ultimately I want them to be happy but I still want to be able to relate to them and know that they live lives that resemble my own. Yet these people are people, apart from psychological fascination, why do I need to know this? If I were them I wouldn’t want the world to know anything about me. Why do we feel like we should have access to these people? Why should we know what they eat, what they wear and the down points in the lives of these people?

There seems to be this morbid fascination with people we don’t know. Is it that we, as humans, are just happy that we are not as bad off as other people? Or something more sinister? The problem is, is that we are invading peoples personal lives without thought about the effect it has on them. There is no thought to the ramifications of what a life might be like lived where people know every detail about your children, your breakfast cereal and how many kilos you’ve dropped in the last month.

There seems to be this morbid fascination with people we don’t know

Psychoanalysists would say that this celebrity construction a result of the projection and sublimation of our own feelings onto other objects and people. For instance, the outcry of grief after Lady Diana died in England. This is just one explanation from a psychological perspective, yet I remain reticent to say that all these magazines are about the underlying unconscious.

I feel so incredibly sorry for Owen Wilson, if he has indeed attempted to take his own life because he has now no privacy, everyone knows, everyone judges and he can not simply exist within the supporting environment of those that really do love him. It makes me mad and angry that we do have this fascination and that we don’t just leave people alone. We live in a world where it is so easy to access everything. We take it for granted that we can know about these people but I really don’t think we have any right to know. If they want to do interviews, tell us what they did last week then that’s fine, but we do not need to know the deep dark secrets of anybody in the spot light. We let them speak for us yet we do not own their actions or their lives. We should have no say in who they are or who they should be. We certainly shouldn’t know when they ‘might’ be in hospital for an attempted suicide, the same way that really no one should slow down in the unfortunate event of an accident. I think the focus should be on our lives, what happens to each individual, not to someone somewhere out there whom we will never really know.

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