People are better in the abstract and getting the high definition version of someone exposes flaws you didn’t know about or ignored while you thought highly of them.
It means don’t put people on a pedestal. Everyone is human and everyone has flaws. Don’t try to put people above flaws because they have them and if you pretend they don’t exist, the realisation will just hit harder.
There’s a great episode of The Crown that sums it up for me. Prince Phillip is overly excited to meet the astronauts from Apollo 11 during their royal visit and prepares a lot of deep and philosophical questions for them to discuss. However upon meeting them he is bitterly disappointed to find they are just normal humans that find fart jokes funny.
Never meet your heroes means exactly this: you will come to realise the person you look up to and hold in high esteem is just another person with typical person problems, if not have other character traits you despise. They’ve done something you find admirable, that’s great! But leave the relationship there.
Back in 2000 I lived in Loveland, OH which is just north of Cincinnati, OH. There used to be an old fashioned barber shop on Loveland-Madeira road.
I walked into the barber shop and was greeted by the barber and told to take a seat. There were two other men in the shop. One was in the chair and getting his hair cut and the other was reading a newspaper and I was unable to see his face at all. The barber finished with the guy in the chair and looked over at the man reading the newspaper and said:
“Neil you’re up.”
The man closed his newspaper and laid on the chair next to him…
And I found myself looking at the first man that walked on the moon.
I completely blew every circuit breaker in my brain. Somehow though I managed to keep my composure and didn’t turn into a complete idiot. As he got his hair cut we talked about mundane things, never once talking about space flight, although we did discuss aviation. At the time I was a skydiver and he actually had some questions about it. He told me that he had a ride under a parachute… I replied, yeah I’ve seen that video.
And that is how I met and had a conversation with Neil Armstrong.
To me it means the hero might have done something notable or impressive but once you meet them in person you realize they are just people with the same faults and annoyances as everyone else.
It used to mean that the idealized version of people you see from a distance isn’t necessarily going to jive with who they actually are. They may seem mythical and turn out to be mundane. They may seem genuine and turn out to be farce. It’s better to let them live as an image in your heart than to resolve them into all that a person is in reality.
Unfortunately, as so many things have gone, even that is too optimistic for the world I find myself in. Not a song, not a character, not a book or ideal has managed to remain unsullied by the realization that we’ve culturally agreed that sex crimes are just ok. Especially against children. Don’t meet your heroes, they’ll probably rape you.
Heroes are an ideal you admire from afar. Humans all have flaws up close.
Nothing, I totally want to meet my heroes.
I’m just after an autograph so my grandchildren can be rich 😮💨
Everyone looks better from a distance
At closer inspection your idolization will fall apart because everyone struggles, wings it and is only human.
I think its better reworded as “don’t idolize people; everyone is flawed”.
Tangential to that phrases I’ve come to understand that everyone will let you down in some way or another.
I interpret it the way it’s intended but it’s a pretty annoying phrase to me.
Never meet my heroes? I’ve already been disillusioned by the people I know closely in real life, nobody is perfect and it would have been naive to assume some celebrity is. I have never “modelled my life on someone” or aspired to take their niche in the celebrity ecosystem, because thst woild be unoriginal.
I think that’s a more productive lesson you can derive from it - aim to be a best version of yourself instead of a presented/catered version of someone else
Also, a very literal interpretation is also correct - famous people don’t like meeting “plebs” unless they’ve mentally prepared for it
heros don’t exist in a world filled with villains.
I have none, so it doesn’t mean much. A few people I respect I guess.
Nothing because my “heroes” are virtuous, prosocial men who are all dead and gave their lives for the greater good (and I also never expected them to be perfect because they are people after all).
Like, if your hero is a baseball player or a showbiz person, that’s on you and your weird thinking, and I don’t know why you’d pick that. I LOOOOOOVE Kanye’s music but the man is fully mentally gone and even before he wasn’t anywhere close to righteous enough for me to consider him my “hero”, lol.
