Returning to the thoughts about attention, we no longer have role models and heroes in our culture, just celebrities. It does not matter how a celebrity achieves fame. Often bad acts are even more valuable to the task at hand than virtuous ones.
Virtuous people have lovelier funerals but less celebrated lives. There has never been a television show called lifestyles of the modest and generous. When do we witness a public-facing person discussing someone else’s book or engaged in a discussion where he does more listening than talking?
The best we can hope for in this age are celebrities with deep and interesting enough souls to perform brave and charitable acts, so that we can celebrate them, model behavior for others, and hope to someday advance to an age where people are honored for the positive effect they have on humanity. To get there, we all might need to accept a little more boredom into our lives, for our own good.