Ego is a hell of a thing. We all have one, and what feeds yours and what bruises it is completely different from everyone around you. They're like fingerprints, in that every ego is unique. It is, after all, a large part of what composes the you that is you.
A healthy ego is fed by many things and is bruised by little, but the things that feed it also need to be healthy. Developing skills and earning competence is good. Aligning your values and actions is pretty great, too. Honest self-reflection that allows one to take criticisms and learn from failure is a must for a healthy ego.
And then there's the authenticity of interactions with the environment around you. A healthy ego doesn't perform to be liked and accepted; it does what it does and allows one to be liked for who they are.
I'm no psychologist, but these are just a few things that I picked up over the course of my 40-plus years on this Earth that I feel truly allowed me to live in a healthy mental state. I'm sure I'm not the only one who understands this either; in fact, these are principles that have been tried and true since Greeks in togas were contemplating this stuff.
And I think that's one of the reasons Hollywood, and I'd say quite a few in the public-facing realm, is/are seeing a slow death. The collective egos of the giltterati have been so easily disturbed that they consistently look like children when they don't get their way. Over the last decade, they've been throwing collective temper tantrums over Donald Trump being elected president, and it hasn't stopped since Biden was elected. It kept going, and going, and going. I'd even go so far as to say that this is what helped get Trump reelected.
Hollywood — the term we use for the entertainment industry — has become so hyper-focused on Donald Trump that they talk about him ad nauseam. It's like an addiction for them, and I'm not sure how anyone could be that obsessed with anything. After talking about the same thing for too long, I start to get bored, and I have to switch it up for my own sanity. They keep talking about Trump like he's the only thing in the world that's happening.
You all know Stephen Colbert, the late-night show host who was so obsessed with bad orange man that it pretty well cost him his show. As I've said before, Colbert was offering a singular product that he refused to change with the times, and people got sick of it. They tuned out, and now Colbert is on his last season.
Read: Colbert Should Be a Lesson to the Left About How Capitalism Works
Colbert was literally watching his audience abandon him, but he kept going. Colbert is, I'd say, a great representative of Hollywood's inability to abandon its prejudices in the name of keeping the business afloat.
And I think a huge part of this unwillingness to move away from the poison that's killing you is because, as many leftists have, they've attached their ego to their politics. Their entire being is wrapped up in the losses and gains of a political party or a socio-political agenda, and anything that threatens that demands unmitigated rage and constant denunciation.
Colbert, for his part, used his late-night "comedy" show as a personal platform for his political ego-stroking and, as such, became more of a walking, talking, sometimes dancing propaganda piece. It stroked his ego. Made him feel good, but it also made him a tool, and his ego was tied to how well of a tool he was being, and that means even his guests had to be conducive to that end.
And that's become so apparent that his guests' constant tributes to him made him so insufferable that even Variety, one of the leftists' leftist Hollywood rags, started to find it too much:
What has ended up making it to air has been an increasingly puffy tribute to the show’s own host. The endless bouquets being tossed Colbert’s way have started to make the studio smell a bit cloying.
[...]
The cause of standing up for a comedian who may have been tossed aside for angering the regime is getting tied up in honoring Colbert the celebrity, and it’s starting to feel wearying. Colbert deserved better treatment from CBS, but watching one person beam while receiving laurel after laurel doesn’t make the argument for his show’s relevance, as it’s frankly not very good TV, and — for this relentlessly political host — not in touch with the concerns of people who have been turning to “The Late Show” for its political perspective.
This Variety host nails the target in one regard but misses it in another.
Watching Colbert, a hyper-partisan "entertainer," have nothing but other celebrities patting his back and giving him applause in front of the crowd isn't good television and does nothing to move the needle, but what Variety isn't getting is that moving the needle isn't the point.
These celebrities are using Colbert to do what Colbert has been using his platform for; and that's making sure everyone sees how anti-Trump they are. Colbert used his stage until he, himself, became the stage on which anti-Trump celebrities tap dance for the sake of their own egos. It's dressed up as a tribute, but in the end, Colbert is just being used as the tool he allowed himself to transform into.
And that's a sad state of being. Colbert is so far gone that all his life's work, all he's accomplished, means nothing. All that he is now is an object tied to a political narrative. Even his own peers, the people who supposedly love him, use him as a way to show their hatred of another person.
There's a lesson here. Tie your ego to something other than a political party or a singular human, because you're more than what other people create.
