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It is usually a term reserved for one-way relationships, celebrities and their fans for example. Fans know an awful lot about their favourite celebrity and devote considerable time to the relationship. The celebrity will likely not even know that the fan exists. Still, people (the fan) can gain important benefits and I really don’t want to imply that these are somehow “bad” relationships, just that they are very different from what we normally think of as friendship.

This is something that I also connect to what I read a while ago, and it has to do with the social limitation I mentioned before.

Basically, we tend to personify something fictional. The first cities were city-states, most had their own patron god, often named after the city.

From then to now, not much has changed. Even supposedly monotheistic religions. Catholicism (especially here in South America) borrows a lot from polytheism. Saints are like minor gods, in principle. And I've known people who practiced folk Catholicism, where there are a myriad of unofficial, often local, saints. In a lot of cases, there's a story behind the saint, a local person who for some reason or other died, and some "miracle" was performed at some point. People will go vast distances to get to a spot where this saint died, or you'll see shrines along a road, where you can stop to place offerings and pray.

As our understanding of the world has evolved, religion loses "territory", which means it stops keeping people united under a fiction.

And today we're all scrambling to find a different fiction to keep us together.

Celebrities, politicians, brands, music genres, social media platforms, etc.

Anyway, boom! :P

I'm doing much better today. Weekends tend to exhaust me because I get visitors (family checking on me and helping me with stuff). The rest of the week is generally far better.

How are you doing?