Why It's Ruining Everything

It takes a lot to develop a successful music career. You need money for instruments and lessons. You need hours of leisure time daily to practice and develop skills. You need family members to drive you around and take you to lessons and competitions. You need a butler to pick up all your crumpled music-writing sheets and broken guitar strings. None of these things are exactly overflowing in genuinely damaged backgrounds.

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Most working-class Americans can afford, at best, a part-time butler.

Of course, there are musicians who are born so talented that they don't need any of that and build their own instruments out of the piles of dirty needles in their parents' bedrooms. But successful people from horrible backgrounds usually get out of those situations by doing things that are not typical for that background. This applies to all kinds of successful careers, not just music: If your upbringing really sucked, a big part of becoming successful will involve differentiating yourself as much as possible from the people around you. If you're from a family of meth dealers, you'll have to forgo spending your teenage years learning the meth trade. If your parents are poor alcoholics, you'll need to save up all those beer cans and trade them in for deposit money instead of learning the art of crushing them with your head like everyone else.

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It's like missing your own bar mitzvah.

But audiences don't want to hear that about their favorite musicians, because "staying inside practicing scales while all the other 15-year-olds drink until they puke" is far too boring and middle class and unromantic a story for the music industry. So instead, young music fans are left with the impression that, even if you're raised by homeless crack addicts, you can just party hard and one day the magical success fairy will come to you, too.

Sure, you say, but some people do make awful adolescent decisions and end up doing just fine. Well, some people can get away with bad decisions more than others. Which leads me to ...

Since then, I've discovered that these vanity projects are much like our reptilian overlords: hidden everywhere in plain sight. If you live in a big city, you've probably frequented many of these for-fun businesses without noticing that they don't need to turn a profit to survive. Think of that artisan coffee shop that made you grind your own beans, or the gallery that contained nothing but impressionist portraits of the artist's own dick. The cash support behind vanity projects is not always quite as obvious: The writer across the street might technically be living off the money he makes writing free-form poetry about Nicolas Cage, but his parents are probably still buying his health insurance and chipping in money whenever he gets hit with another stalking charge.

Why It's Ruining Everything

There's nothing inherently wrong with a business or career being financially supported by another person. It's the fact that nobody admits to this that does the damage. In our society, financial help of any kind is treated like an embarrassing groin rash to be kept to ourselves and the necessary professionals. But this means that many of us who don't have that outside support see people like the Nicolas Cage poet getting by just fine, and we conclude that Nicolas Cage poetry is a viable career for anyone.

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Even for Nicolas Cage.

Everyone laughs at Joe Graduate Student, who spent $50,000 on a useless master's degree in fan fiction studies or whatever. But maybe Joe, and many students like him, grew up seeing other people with similarly useless degrees who seemed to be doing just fine. No one mentioned to Joe that these other uselessly degreed people had parents who were quietly paying off their credit cards every month. So Joe followed his dream and got the degree, and today he is selling his body to supplement his fan fiction income.

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You don't want to know what's in that cup.

Obviously, this doesn't mean that anyone without rich parents should resign themselves to working 16-hour shifts in the potato factory until they die (well, unless they're in Idaho. I'm pretty sure they don't let anyone out of Idaho). But lacking a hidden safety net woven from your parents' hundred-dollar bills means that you'll have to work harder, accept more risks, and recognize that if you fail, you will fail harder. Instead of acknowledging this, though, we've created a fantasy world in which we pretend that anyone can afford a condo in New York with the profits from their homemade cat jewelry startup.

So what's with all the lying? Most of these celebrities give out their dieting advice via publicists. It's not a publicist's job to get their clients to tell the truth; it's their job to make their clients likeable, and people like celebrities they can relate to. Extreme dieting, or an exercise regimen that's more demanding than a full-time job, does not exactly make you come across as one of the common people.

Why It's Ruining Everything

This "Losing weight is easy!" bullshit is about as good for society as a no-calorie diet is for your health. People who want to lose weight and try to follow celebrity advice will soon discover that the weight isn't "falling off" as promised and give up. Women who aren't rake-thin two months after having a baby are left looking like they're just too lazy to walk around the house now and then. Even people who successfully lose weight probably won't get any credit for it: After all, that stuff is easy, right?

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Ten minutes ago, both of these women were 200 pounds heavier.

You might be thinking, "Well, it serves people right for listening to celebrities!" But like it or not, models and actors are considered the professionals of being thin and good-looking. If Olympic runners started lying about how easy it is to be an Olympic runner -- they didn't train at all, and "the seconds just flew off" -- we'd probably have a problem. But these professional non-fat people keep dishing out shitty dieting advice year after year, and everyone's OK with it.