There is an adage: you should never meet your heroes. You don’t have to worry about that, because there are no heroes anymore. Social media killed them.

I’m not talking about Batman, Wonder Woman, Luke Skywalker, or any other fictional character – that’s a whole other debate. I’m also not referring to genuine, bona fide heroes like firefighters, or people who selflessly help others, though they are amazing and deserve our gratitude.

I’m talking about hero figures. The figures we look up to, the figures we aspire to be like. The figures who make us ask ourselves: “what would they do or say in this situation?”

I’m referring to the people old farts like me looked up to when we were kids, teens, and even into adulthood.

Young people don’t have hero figures anymore, and neither do I. Mine all died, or self-destructed, and have never been replaced.

They can’t be replaced, and for the same reason young people don’t have hero figures – the internet won’t allow them to exist.

Let’s be clear here with respect to younger generations, and those of us who are older, internet savvy and perhaps naively young at heart: following, liking, and subscribing do not a hero make.

Hero figures, the colossuses of music, screen, stage, science, writing, intellectualism, all had one thing in common – a mystique born of us knowing almost nothing about their private lives.

For the most part, outside of what was said in interviews, or shown in magazine exposés, most of what we knew about these figures came from their public appearances and what they put out into the world, much of which was crafted to cultivate the image they wanted the world to have of them.

Ask any publicist from the 80’s: not every hotel room that was smashed up by a “hair band” was the result of a drug- and alcohol-fueled orgy.

Today, it’s a different story. Everything that anybody with the tiniest amount of celebrity does is reported, scrutinized, reworded, misquoted, taken out of context, and flat-out lied about. Even things that were at one time innocent are dug up, taken out of context, and all of this used for the benefit of others to fuel agendas (both good and bad), to generate rage-bait, clickbait and advertising dollars, or simply so someone with an inferiority complex can feel superior for a few minutes.

The worst part is we do it to ourselves. Obviously I’m not a celebrity, but who knows, maybe someday I’ll be lucky enough to make a living by becoming a meme. Hawk Tuah.

You might even be one too. But until then, we will keep posting every inane thought we have online, every picture, every meal, every party, every drink…

We’ll comment, endorse, like, share, and argue on every political, social, medical, and scientific post we come across, regardless of our actual level of knowledge and giving no deference to the notion that some asshole will dig the post up in 10 years to get us fired from our jobs. Not aligning with corporate image and all that.

Even worse, we’ll start podcasts, and freed from the constraints of a writers’ room, tempering opinions, and a script, we’ll pull the curtain back revealing the man behind the wizard. Everyone gets to see the hairy balls hanging below the too short housecoat.

I’m not saying that’s how one of my hero figures fell from grace, but I’m not saying it isn’t abso-fucking-lutley how it happened either.

You can’t have heroes when every flaw, every word, every action is scrutinized and dissected by a multitude of people, for a myriad of reasons, not the least of which are jealousy, greed, and personal agendas.

But that’s what we’ll do, because we want to feel attached, connected, seen, and loved.

We’ll do it despite the fact that we shun personal relationships in favor of the screen in our hands. Because we won’t talk to people at coffee shops, or on the train, or at the store. We’ll do it because we live in our bubbles with our earbuds in at the grocery store, and anybody who wants to interact with us is weird and creepy.

Yet we still want to be loved, and seen, and recognized.

We want our existence to be validated and we want to connect to something bigger than ourselves. So we reach out the only way we can – online.

Some will do it just for the connection, others for attention. Some will have other motives as well, but without a guiding principle, without someone to look up to, to emulate, to aspire to be like, to aspire to be even better than, what happens?

I’ll tell you: we become the heroes of our own stories. Sounds great right: be your own hero?

Sure does, but villains are also the heroes of their own stories.

Let that sink in for a moment. Villains are the heroes of their own stories.

In the desert of the real, and the realm of fiction, there is very little that separates villains from heroes.

What makes a hero? What makes a good person a good person? When you get down to brass tacks, what separates good from evil?

In stories, the difference between the hero and the villain is typically guidance – whether it’s friends, real connections to people, mentors, a positive influential figure to look up to and gauge themselves against – what the hero has the villain lacks.

Those very same things usually prevent people, real and fictional, from becoming the villain at inflection points.

We spend more time isolated, seeing the world through the lens of an increasingly polarized, greedy, and cynical internet, desperate to make our mark, but ultimately only hastening our own downfall.

The media, particularly social media, more than put the final nail in the coffin of heroes.

They’re not coming back, not on the internet at least.