Like, why do you care so much if she’s sleeping with a new guy after just divorcing or her coming out or that rich family buying a new mansion? How does that affect your life?
Because they’re stupid
As your perception sounds quite negative I’ll try to change your view!
Instead of looking down on people fanatifally following a “celebrity”, take pity on them:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction
In short: their brain chemistry tricks them into thinking that they are following a friend and have the emotional reactions and interests as we’d hope our real friends do.
I find it really sad to be honest.
It’s because they have nothing of value in their own lives to talk or gossip about.
I don’t really understand it, but I think you can apply your argument to anything. Why watch Game of Thrones, how does that affect your life? Why browse Lemmy, how does that affect your life? Why play video games, how does that affect your life? Why watch sports, how does it affect your life?
The answer is probably something like “because I enjoy it”, and the answer for the gossipers is probably the same. So who am I to judge.
My hobbies could asphyxiate or poison your hobbies.
(I just started my distillation process today to recover and purifify isopropyl alcohol from my 3D resin prints, if you were curious.)
From an evolutionary standpoint it’s important to know what’s going on with people close to you. Who are people close to you? Why, obviously people who you’re familiar with - those whose faces you recognise and whose names you know.
So yeah, it’s a bug in how we’re coded.
I think people have a tendency to use evolutionary psychology as a crutch in explaining human behaviour. Like they suggest it can explain everything when it’s only one factor of many.
However in this specific case your theory makes a lot of sense to me.
You’re talking about at least millions of people making billions of decisions. It’s always going to have multiple factors. But evolution is almost always directly relevant, because it shaped our brain to the patterns it follows.
In this example, there are also plenty of external factors. The internet makes it possible to follow the behavior of celebrities. The celebrities have significant marketing teams actively trying to grab your interest (plus whatever businesses they’re famous in relation to trying to piggy back). The fact that you don’t have to spend 18 hours a day tracking prey just in case you manage to kill it. The fact that we’re hugely biased to be interested in more attractive people, to find people we’re exposed to more (especially in more glamorous lights) more attractive and most celebrities are also extremely attractive with professional teams to handle their appearance. The list always goes on.
But evolution is pretty much always a key lens to why we are what we are, because it actually is the why to almost all the low level behaviors that add up to big picture specific modern ones.
