I Unsubscribed From Celebrity Culture and I Feel So Much Better

 

For years, celebrity content was just part of my everyday internet life, so normal and woven into everything I did online that I barely even noticed how much of it I was consuming. I would listen to celebrity podcasts while doing things around the house, watch YouTube videos about celebrities, wander into celebrity subreddits, read discussions about people I had never met and knew absolutely nothing about beyond what the internet had decided to tell me, and then open Instagram only to be greeted by another celebrity post that the algorithm had apparently decided I desperately needed to see.

And the funny thing is, I never sat down and consciously decided that I wanted to spend so much of my time consuming other people's lives.

It just happened.

That is the strange thing about the internet now. You don't necessarily have to seek something out anymore because the internet will bring it directly to you, repeatedly, persistently and with the confidence of someone who apparently knows you better than you know yourself. You watch one celebrity interview and suddenly YouTube has decided that you are interested in every interview that person has ever done. You click on one Instagram post and suddenly your feed is full of celebrity relationships, celebrity breakups, celebrity outfits, celebrity vacations, celebrity scandals, celebrity opinions, celebrity feuds and endless photographs of people whose lives have nothing whatsoever to do with yours.

I recently realized I was tired of it.

Not necessarily because I hate celebrities or because I think there is something inherently wrong with enjoying pop culture. I have always been interested in people, culture, entertainment and the weird little stories that develop around famous people, and I understand why celebrity culture can be entertaining. There is something fascinating about watching someone become famous, seeing how the public reacts to them and observing the strange relationship we develop with people we have never met.

But there is a difference between enjoying something occasionally and allowing it to become background noise in your life.

I started noticing how much celebrity content was actually cluttering my mind, and once I became aware of it, I couldn't really unsee it. I would hear about some celebrity I didn't particularly care about and somehow know what they were doing, who they were dating, what someone had said about them, what their fans thought, what their critics thought and what some random person on Reddit had decided their behavior supposedly meant.

Why did I know all of this? Why was I carrying around information about strangers that I didn't even consciously choose to learn?

So I started unsubscribing.

I unsubscribed from celebrity podcasts. I stopped following YouTube channels that revolved around celebrity news and commentary. I left celebrity subreddits that had become part of my routine. I stopped clicking on celebrity posts that Instagram kept pushing into my face, even though the app seemed determined to convince me that I absolutely needed to know what some famous person had worn, said, posted, deleted or done that day.

And I had to become quite intentional about that last one because Instagram really does seem to have an endless supply of celebrity content it wants to put in front of me.

I would scroll through my feed and see a suggested celebrity post, and if I clicked on it, even out of mild curiosity, the algorithm seemed to interpret that as a declaration of lifelong devotion. Suddenly I would get more of that person, then people associated with that person, then another celebrity, then a discussion about a celebrity, and before I knew it I was ten minutes deep into something I had absolutely no intention of looking at when I opened the app.

So I stopped feeding it. I stopped clicking. I stopped rewarding the algorithm for showing me things I didn't actually want to see. And I feel so much better.

It is difficult to explain how much lighter the internet feels when you remove a constant stream of information about people you don't know from your daily life. There is less noise in my head, less temptation to compare my life to carefully curated celebrity lives and less of that weird feeling of being mentally involved in dramas that have absolutely nothing to do with me.

I also noticed that I started becoming more interested in my own life again. That might sound dramatic, but I think there is something to it.

When you are constantly looking at other people's lives, even when those lives are presented as entertainment, you can become accustomed to observing rather than participating. You are watching someone else's relationship, someone else's home, someone's body, someone's career, someone's vacation, someone's outfit, someone's success, someone's failure, someone's problems and someone's transformation, while your own life is happening quietly in the background.

And I don't want to spend my one precious life being an audience member for everybody else's. There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from knowing too much about people you will never meet.

Celebrity culture can make strangers feel strangely intimate, and social media has made that even more intense because we aren't just seeing actors in movies or musicians performing on stage anymore. We see what they supposedly eat, what their homes look like, where they travel, what their relationships look like, what their children look like, what they buy, what they wear and what they are doing at two o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon.

It creates this illusion of closeness, even though there is no actual relationship there.

And I think women in particular can get pulled into this because so much of celebrity content is connected to things we are already encouraged to obsess over, including beauty, aging, relationships, motherhood, marriage, weight, fashion, money, success and whether we are somehow doing womanhood correctly. We can spend hours looking at another woman's appearance and life while quietly judging our own against it, even when we know perfectly well that we are comparing our ordinary reality to a highly managed public image.

I don't want to do that to myself anymore.

I don't want to wake up and immediately absorb somebody else's life before I have even had a chance to think about my own. I don't want my brain filled with celebrity relationship speculation when I could be thinking about the book I'm reading, the meal I'm making, something I want to create, a room I want to make prettier, an idea I want to write about or simply what I actually feel that day.

And there is another thing I didn't expect. Once I stopped consuming so much celebrity content, I realized how little I missed it. That was probably the biggest revelation.

I thought I would feel like I was missing out on something. I thought I would eventually become curious about what was happening with certain people and go looking for updates. Instead, I mostly felt relieved. I didn't need to know what happened. I didn't need to know who was fighting with whom. I didn't need to know what somebody's ex had posted or what some celebrity's fans were arguing about that week.

The world kept turning. My life kept going. And I was perfectly fine.

I also think there is something empowering about deliberately deciding what gets access to your attention. We talk so much about protecting our physical spaces from clutter, but I think we need to be just as protective of our mental spaces. We declutter our wardrobes, clean our kitchens, organize our drawers and throw away things we don't use anymore, but then we allow our phones to pour an endless stream of information into our minds from the moment we wake up until the moment we go to sleep.

I don't want that anymore.

I want my online life to feel more like a place I intentionally visit rather than a place where I'm constantly being dragged from one person's life into another.

So no, I haven't suddenly become completely disconnected from pop culture, and I'm not pretending that I will never be curious about a celebrity again. If there is a movie I want to watch, a musician whose work I enjoy or a particular story that genuinely interests me, I'll still engage with it. The difference is that I want to choose it.

I don't want the algorithm choosing it for me.

There is a big difference between intentionally enjoying something and having something repeatedly inserted into your attention until you start believing you are interested in it.

And maybe that is the real lesson I have taken from this little internet cleanse. I don't have to consume everything that is offered to me. I don't have to click simply because something is presented in front of me. I don't have to know every piece of gossip, every scandal, every breakup or every ridiculous internet debate, and I certainly don't need to spend my limited attention trying to understand the private lives of people who have no idea I exist.

My attention belongs to me. My curiosity belongs to me. My time belongs to me. And getting some of it back has been one of the nicest things I've done for myself lately.

There is a lot of noise online, and there will always be another celebrity story, another podcast episode, another Reddit thread, another YouTube video and another suggested Instagram post waiting for us. We can't control everything the internet puts in front of us, but we can decide what we invite into our minds and what we quietly scroll past.

For me, scrolling past has become a form of self-care. And I genuinely feel better for it.

Thankful for your presence, Neja