I’ve been watching VisionQuest. No spoilers here, but in one episode Vision goes digging through his mind and ends up face to face with an older version of himself. One he’s idealised. (Some great writing and acting happened here, btw.) And that older self calls him out:
You have placed me on a pedestal so impossibly high and not to honor me, but to spare yourself the effort of the climb.
That one stuck. Mostly because it probably cuts both ways.
It may seem as though being on a pedestal is nice, but it probably isn’t. Once you’re up there, things start getting deferred to you. Questions route to you. Decisions wait for you. And the people below quietly stop climbing, because why would they? Someone’s already up there.
So the pedestal isn’t really an honour, but a bottleneck folks agreed to. The person on top stops being challenged, and everyone else stops growing. Nobody wins. Everyone gets to stay comfortable.
Then there’s the other end, looking up.
The people worth admiring tend to have strength, resilience and courage. Which is a problem, because those aren’t things you can pick up by watching. You can study a good writer and steal their habits. You can’t study someone’s resilience. You only get that by going through something hard yourself.
Which makes admiring it suspiciously easy. “They’re just built different” is very comfortable to say. It lets you off the hook.
The pedestal isn’t really about the person on it. It’s about distance. Vision would rather admire that older version of himself than do the work of becoming him again (arguably he had good reasons). Keep someone up high enough and you never have to climb.
And that’s where it stings. Most of us have a climb we’re quietly sparing ourselves, or afraid of. Usually it’s a dream. What’s in the way is sometimes a fear of failing. Or baggage. Or a pain you need to face. The pedestal is easier.
Admiring it from a distance is safe. Going after it isn’t. Spotting the pedestal is the easy part. The climb is the rest of it.