I Don’t Really Care About Paul Walker’s Death

My iPhone was dead. I was having dinner with my family. When I got in my car and charged the phone, it blew up. There were a ton of Viber messages from a friend overseas.

“Dude, Paul Walker is dead… This is so sad. I would have loved to fuck him.”

I don’t cry when a famous person I have no emotional attachment to has died.

I barely feel anything. I think “meh, that’s sad,” and then spam text the confirmed link to everyone in my contacts.

If you have a personal attachment to a famous person who’s just died, go ahead and mourn. But if the famous person hasn’t changed or affected your life, why do you care?

Mass media sensationalizing and filtering celebrity death through “the glam machine” — turning them into icons for having a career in Hollywood is not new. They get their cover shoots, their headlines. They get more famous and aren’t even alive to see it.

Paul Walker died in a fatal car crash on November 30th, but so do so many humans, every day. I think about all the victims of family members dying in car crashes, or about people who have experienced a traumatic car crash themselves. How angry they must feel. How pissed off they aren’t in a headline — that sympathy toward their loss isn’t being circulated around the world. How they have no voice, because they’re nobodies.

I’ve never seen any of The Fast and The Furious movies, and I’ve only seen him for like 15 seconds in Brokedown Palace. I saw Varsity Blues and She’s All That, but nothing else he ever did interested me (except his puppy dog face).

It’s clear he was a sex icon, embodying the perfect balance of what mainstream masculinity and beauty is supposed to look like. This makes sense — he was surrounded by hot girls and hotter cars in the franchise that made him bank. He died beautiful. Some of us will die ugly.

I send my condolences to all of Paul Walker’s friends, family, fans, his 15 year old daughter Meadow, and to other loved ones, but personally, I don’t care. His death does not affect my life. I also will not pretend to care by taking the time to suddenly explore his IMDB page now that he’s dead, like how I didn’t when he was alive.

I think your emotional priorities are fucked up if you’re more focused on giving your sympathy to a celebrity that will never know your name instead of channeling that energy into the people in your everyday life.

Go ahead and hashtag: #RipPaulWalker on your Instagram underneath a picture of him and write a little paragraph about how much he meant to you. But that isn’t going to make him come back.

You either die a trending topic or you don’t. Either way, when you do die — you will be a #RIPYourNameHere post by someone, and people will post pictures about you on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook for whatever reason. To feel gratified by sympathy or likes. Remember Selfies at Funerals?

Your funeral will be digital, on social media. There isn’t anything you can do about it.