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So to combat falling into parasocial not-really-relationships, we should see their content as not really them, not really indicative of who they are, anything we have to tell ourselves to not feel as if we're connected when we're not. False connection is worse than no connection at all, like believing lies is worse than "I just don't know".

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As someone who struggled with and had to ‘first principles’ social skills, I feel this even in many mundane interactions.

People wear masks all the time because sometimes their true self is not conducive to what they are doing at that time.

For a celebrity entertainer who needs to appeal to a crowd of tens of thousands, their Dunbar’s number, even optimistically, will be orders of magnitude smaller.

Therefore, the gap of inner circle-audience will be made up by an act relying on their ability/looks/charm which is necessarily contrived and not reflective of their true self.

Yeah and the people who seem to have a smaller gap seem to die young. Farley and John Candy were said to be very nice to the "little people".

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