"Nowhere perhaps is our throwaway attitude toward relationships more evident than on the Internet and in our celebrity-obsessed culture. While, as I said earlier, the Internet offers an extraordinary array of information that has been made available for more people more easily than at any time in human history, the Web also is full of pornography, slander, videos of people behaving without a shred of self-respect, and a whole range of activities that do nothing but divert too many people from their attempts to lead authentic lives. They spend their time in online chat rooms rather than talking to their partners. They consume pornography to experience virtual sex rather than make love to their flesh-and-blood companions. They watch people making fools of themselves and even produce their own videos so that they, too, can get their fifteen minutes of fame.
"The only way I can think about our addiction to stardom and the vicarious pleasures we seek from other peoples' relationship satisfactions or woes is to assume that everyone has a desperate desire to be noticed. Many people seem to feel unnoticed and literally unregarded in their daily lives. They want someone to pay attention to them, even if it's for the most ridiculous and undignified reasons, as if even the momentary exposure to the glare of other peoples' negative judgment about them will make them feel better about ourselves. This is a tragedy, since fame and renown can be as addictive a junk drug as junk food and narcotics. Once you are famous it's hard to release the desire to keep being famous. But fame is fickle and, as countless celebrities and others have found to their cost, a life removed from the spotlight once you've experienced such attention can be very hard. You need to be very strong in yourself and aware that many people do not see you but see your image to resist the depression that occurs when you're no longer in the public eye.
"It's a truism that the more you like yourself, the more others will like you; while the more you dislike yourself, the less others will like you. In the last three decades, the human potential movement has burgeoned as people have attempted to make themselves happy through 'working' on themselves. The results have been mixed, to say the least. Sometimes I feel as though the effort to develop our potential has merely led to more ways to develop a potential for even more self-obsession. We need to cultivate the contemplative life; and we also need to foster a life of service — where we gain the most satisfaction for ourselves by giving of ourselves."
