Mizzougrad96 said:
Both should know better though.
See, but isn't that a little unrealistic? They should know better because ... why? Both of them were famous at 15. Neither has lived any kind of normal life. Each was essentially steered into a situation where they had a real adult job as a teenager. It doens't surprise me at all that Phelps and Cyrus might have some kind of public crack up because emotionally they've sort of been living in a dark cave for the last five years.
We should probably know better than to expect something unrealistic from them.
He's a swimmer. She's a singer/entertainer. Neither of them seems particularly bright.
99.9 percent of us won't even post on SportsJournalists.com under our real names because we fear the reprecussions of what we write. And the most famous person on this board isn't even 1/100th as famous as either of those two. I can't imagine what kind of stupid trouble I'd have gotten into at 15, 19, 23, or 33 if I had an army of citizen paparazzi watching ever move I made.
It's kind of the perfect storm of failed expectations.
1. Someone is famous at a young age.
2. That someone is not super bright.
3. That someone is marketed as something they are not.
4. Unrealistic expectations are established.
5. The not-that-bright someone is under considerable pressure to be perfect.
6. Way too much money is involved and people make decisions without the person's real interests at heart.
7. Because the person tries hard to act perfect to maintain that fantasy, and because we desire perfection right up until we begin to resent it, there is a considerable amount of schadenfreude when the person fails.
8. Technology has made it such that there are very few private moments anymore.
Put all those things together, shake it up, and you've got Phelps and Cyrus.
