The smaller and less grounded in affairs of significance we feel, the greater our need for identity proxies and champions to represent us in the form of media superstars. But virtually by definition, the more celebrity-infatuated we become, the less importance we tend to ascribe to non-celebrities—including ourselves—until we reach a point where it seems inconceivable that our own limited, humdrum lives and knowledge of the world could count for much of anything.

Compared to the demi-godhead of our celebrities and their exalted experience of what appears to be a vastly more significant dimension of life “on the other side of the screen,” it eventually seems only natural to feel inconsequential.