There is a dependent relationship between hedonist and heroes, this two types of archetypes can't exist without each other. Hedonist need people to admire to voyeuristically live their boring underachieving lives through, and heroes need hedonist to admire and prey on. One without the others can't exist.
Just to be very clear a hero is someone who is willing to work hard and take big risk in order to accomplish things that not a lot of people are capable to do, even if this mean living a compromised life and sacrifice their comfort and pleasure in the present to accomplish their goals. While a hedonist is someone that prioritizes pleasure and happiness above everything else including his own faith in the future or the well being of the people around him.
If you are someone that is eating whatever whenever with a very little concern about what is doing to your body and health, you might find it comforting that reality TV shows exist where people have magical transformation overnight, losing massive amounts of weight and looking shockingly different because you use this examples to justify your poor behaviour in the moment. It is ok for me to eat this burger if I get fat or sick I can be like this person i saw on television and lose all the weight in few weeks and get healthy. This is fiction because it takes most people years to lose a big amount of weight and it is a pretty hard journey where you need to do research, test various diets, and you always have the danger of a relapse. In my experience the way you live one decade of your life determines the quality of your next decade in life.
When you have agency, and you grow in a normal sustainable way, it is actually annoying having to compete with people that are willing to take risk that are way to big. They will often surpass you, but they will also fail and fall back to zero while youre grow tendency remains almost constant. Not to mention the risk of being tented to adopt their strategies when you see them succeed for brief periods of time.
There is no direct exchange of value between you and your hero, people admire this people not because they are making your life any better but because they hope that one day they will be more like them. For example if you go to watch a movie with one of your favorite actors, that you might consider a hero. I could say that there is an uneven exchange of value you pay for two hours of empty entertainment while the actor on the screen gets payed millions of dollars to play that part in the movie and is worshiped like a demigod. If you watch a lot of movie the quality of your life won't increase, it is actually going to go down because you are not doing anything usefull for yourself.
This is why heroes are actually toxic for society and culture, they destroy value and sabotage others for their own benefits.
