If you were awake at about 12:30am this Monday morning, perhaps you read the news. Kim Kardashian is pregnant with Kanye West’s baby.

You may then have felt this:

After all: despite the fact that we here at Death and Taxes really do like Kanye West, it has to be said that the guy has a voracious and out of control ego. Also, Kim is famous simply for being famous. She rose to stardom due to a sex tape she made with the brother of a mid ’90s sitcom star. She then had a reality show. That’s her actual career trajectory. No albums, no movies, nothing. Just a sex tape. It gets even weirder… Kim’s career path inspired Laurence Fishburne’s daughter to get into porno so that she could… be as famous as Kim. Here’s the quote:

“I view making this movie as an important first step in my career,” Montana Fishburne said in a statement. “I’ve watched how successful Kim Kardashian became and I think a lot of it was due to the release of her sex tape. I’m hoping the same magic will work for me. I’m impatient about getting well-known and having more opportunities, and this seemed like a great way to get started on it.” – source

Ultimately, though, what Kim wants to do with her life, she can do with her life. She actually began her career in 2004 as a celebrity stylist – styling clients from Lindsay Lohan to, uh, Brandy, whose brother is Kim’s costar in the sex tape. Through being photographed multiple times with her childhood friend Paris Hilton – herself no stranger to the fame phenomenon – combined with the sex tape, she rose to fame. Was the fame linked to a perverse, lecherous cultural sentiment in which people, en masse, saw her in a photograph and decided they wanted to bone her? Arguably so, and unfortunately too. It’s our fault how she got here, not hers. Her life choices are her own business, and clearly, seeing as we are coming into the 6th year of production of her family’s sitcom “Keeping Up With The Kardashians”, clearly a lot of people out there care enough for that family to receive millions and millions of dollars each year simply for existing while the rest of us have to go to jobs every day, in the cold, uphill both ways. Which is mildly infuriating.

But, ultimately, it is what it is. Kim’s fame ultimately has nothing to do with her and more with the fact that western culture has turned into a leering, sneering wildebeest that ultimately wants to bring things up and knock them down, over and over, until the thing either dies or stops entirely. Look at it this way: has Madonna had a good song in the last decade? No. But in 2012 she had the biggest grossing tour out of anyone. In the world. She now simply exists entirely on a non-stop washing cycle of residual success: she is now in the business of being Madonna. To fault Kim for her (albiet strange) passageway to fame and fortune would be remiss. There have been people famous just for existing for years—even centuries.

Look at it this way: the only reason people remember the names that we do from years and years ago is because they were legends. Do you think people in 100 years are going to remember Kim Kardashian and Kanye West? No. The Beatles? Maybe. In 200 years time even The Beatles will be nothing more than a cultural footnote. Think of your favorite actor, musician, painter… in 200 years they won’t mean anything. History will ultimately remember just a very select few: Einstein, Neil Armstrong, FDR, Nelson Mandela, Queen Elizabeth, Obama.

The fact that Kim and Kanye committed the most basic human act in order to further the species means nothing. There are 4 people born every second on this planet – the baby of Kim and Kanye will be one of many born that day. Life will go on. The thing is, though, is that for all Kim’s foibles and all of Kanye’s loudmouth antics, the fact remains that they’re probably not entirely bad people. Just famous. People projecting their own insecurities with life is what keeps them at the top – people mad at them for being famous are just mad at where they are in their own lives. So Kim and Kanye having a baby means nothing. Nothing at all. Nothing.