Idols can be anyone from your dad to Tom Brady to a random Youtuber. For some reason you have chosen this person to look up to and have started to idolize their behavior. In most cases we choose someone famous who has a lifestyle we want, acts a way that we wish we could, or is simply better at an action or task than we are. These people stick out in our minds, mold some of our actions, and in many cases we want to be just like them. The steps we take to become more like them is to mold ourselves and our personality towards our perception of them, the way they talk, walk, and move.
When young children begin to idolize someone we can see a slight change in behavior. A shy child who likes a loud YouTuber might start attempting to come out of their shell more or we can watch them play and adopt the style of their favorite player because they think they will play better. If a child is watching a racist idol of theirs they might begin to believe what their idol is saying and parrot the information. The impact of an idol is more noticeable on a child, but it doesn’t mean that adults are immune.
Throughout the course of my life I have had many idols, have some, and will likely have more. For me when I was very young my idols were Barney the purple dinosaur and Bob the builder, those idols taught me to be compassionate and help people where you can. In my young teens it became the former YouTube gaming titan Tobuscus AKA Toby Turner, who has since had a fall from grace. I looked up to Turner because he was everything that I wasn’t. He was funny, likable, had a sizable following, and was popular. I was pretty much the opposite of all of those things but through watching him I felt like maybe I could do half of the things that he seemed to do on a daily basis.
The fall of Toby Turner began when it came out that he had sexually assaulted and cheated on his former girlfriend in a Tumblr post that she had made. This news, while I was completely removed from Turner’s fanbase entirely shocked me. Surely the person who I had looked up to during my early teens wasn’t the the person that they were talking about now. But it was, and despite everything there was nothing that I could do or say that would change his actions.
So why write about idols? Well about a week ago at the time of writing this, one of my idols, Adam Kovic had nudes leaked, and with them the shocking knowledge that he had been cheating on his wife. This news kept me up all night and I struggled to compare the man that I was seeing to the man that I had idolized since 2015. It was another sobering reality check from 2020 that no one is perfect and even those who have the biggest platform are still capable of anything. “The person who I looked up to could never have done this” I kept thinking to myself. Then came the pictures. 400 pictures offering evidence to substantiate the claims, and presumably nonconsensual pictures of his wife that were sent as well.
The harsh reality of life is that no one is perfect. There will never be someone who is consistently perfect their entire life, it just won’t happen. They may be perfect in one area but not everywhere. But having an idol isn’t a bad thing, there are plenty of people who we can look to and find things that we love about them, and reasons to be just like them. It can be as simple as your parent, teacher, or close friend. People may disappoint, but there will always be people who care about you and want to lift you up. I’ve been stunned with how many of my idols have turned out to be terrible people and how many people who I thought I hated have turned out to be genuinely good people.
Don’t let negativity get you down though. There will be plenty more people to look up to and you will look up to them. The lesson isn’t to stop trusting in the magic of people, they can and will change your world in ways that you never could have imagined. The lesson is, no matter who you are let down by, there will be so many more people waiting to bring you back up.
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