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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   2599 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 30, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Is being famous worth it? I used to think people who said no were coping. But it does seem awfully stressful.

"I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: 'Try being rich first. ' See if that doesn't cover most of it. There's not much downside to being rich, other than paying taxes and having your relatives ask you for money. But when you become famous, you end up with a 24-hour job." - Bill Murray

Of course, being famous often entails or leads to being rich, and in those cases it seems worth the trade, but in the worst case, famous people who can't monetize it or who go broke often seem to be miserable.

Being rich and having access is amazing. Fame, not so much.

Sometimes, being rich & and having access comes with the fame. Other times, the fame leads you to riches and access. But if you can decouple them, then the the fame by itself is a nasty thing.

You can't walk down a street without being accosted. You can't trust new relationships. You can't find quiet. You hog attention whether you want to or not. Your closest family members get jaded, as they struggle to form an identity that's separate from you. It's bad all around. There is a reason old-money tries to be anonymous.

Ideally, I'd be rich, priviledged an anonymous. But, I'd rather be all of rich, priviledged and famous than none of them.

Depends on what you consider being 'famous'. Are we talking about Brad Pitt/Kanye West levels of fame? Or is it 300k followers on instagram-type of fame? Former seems to be way too stressful. Latter wouldn't need many lifestyle adjustments, while still bringing in plenty of fame benefits.

Depends on what you want and what the fame brings you. Having lots of people you don't care about asking for your autograph sounds wearying. On the other hand, your increased SMV (assuming you're something like a famous musician rather a famous chess player) will outweigh most negatives for a lot of people.

It’s hard to deny the overriding social benefits: ease of finding many partners, ease of job transitioning, ease of friendship, and even benefits for your children. The stresses can be solved by wearing a wig and sunglasses when you want to have a normal night out I think, which is far effort than what a normal person must expend for the benefits of fame. So I would say it’s worth it (not in sense of acquiring but in possessing) for most normal people.

Depends on whether you're a narcissist I suppose.

I assume the answer is "it depends."

People coming up to you in public is a bit stressful. People sucking up to you is awkward. And you have to deal with journalists.

On the other hand, people will just employ you if you're famous, you don't have to worry about Linkedin. You can just get a sinecure from a big company.

I think it's some people's ingrained nature to do things that make them famous, the pros and cons aren't relevant to them.

No, it doesn't seem like it. There's a mountain biking YouTube channel I watch where the guy is relatively unknown among the general public but who is a celebrity among mountain bikers, and he did a video where he was at a mountain bike festival and had to basically disguise himself while walking down the midway just to have a somewhat typical festival experience. He said it was kind of stressful, and this is just for dealing with normal people who want to say hi and tell him how much they enjoy his work, and maybe get a picture with him. Now imagine that plus it being everywhere you go, every day, and while most people are benign there are a few who absolutely despise you and send hate mail and others who are convinced that you're their one true love and won't stop stalking you. Any sense of a normal life is completely gone. If there's a restaurant you want to try you can't just go there; you have to have your people make sure they can provide special accommodations for you and the handlers that will be necessary to keep the public at bay. Any public place — a bar, a movie theater, a grocery store, whatever — is effectively off-limits.

I've had my own experience of being at the extreme bottom levels of the fame ladder. When I was in high school I was the captain of the academic team and we went on the local CBS affiliate's Saturday morning quiz-bowl show (hosted by a popular news anchor) and won the championship. This meant that I was on TV for several weeks over a period of a few months. At the time I was working as a cashier at a grocery store, and practically every customer recognized me from a local TV show that I was only somewhat aware of before I was on it. It's obviously nowhere near what being even internet famous is like, but people congratulating you and asking the same questions every five minutes does start to wear on you after a while, even though they're good people who just want to express their appreciation that you proved one of the worst schools in the state could hang academically with the best (our road to the championship included defeating a well-known prep school and a suburban public school that is consistently ranked among the best in the state [coincidentally located where I live now]).

If you make a mistake at work you might hear about it from your boss or a coworker but it's no big deal and you move on. If you release a horrible album or act poorly in a movie you have to deal with public criticism. Think of how hard your last breakup was and imagine if people were publicly speculating on what happened and hounding your ex for interviews. Imagine having to screen your own calls. Imagine the insecurity of not knowing if your last date actually liked you or was enthralled by your fame. Imagine dealing with yes-men who tell you you're the best and want a piece of you only to stop returning your calls at the first sign you might not be as profitable as it seemed. Imagine being functionally unable to make new friends who weren't also celebrities. Imagine everyone you ever met suddenly texting you to hang out. Imagine actual friends asking if you can put in word for them with the right people. Awfully stressful is an understatement.

I don't think so.

One, pretty much by definition, very few people can be really famous, so you're setting yourself up to fail.

Two, there's not really all that much tangible upside. Being rich is quite tangibly beneficial. Being famous is harder to put a finger on. You may get more social status in the appropriate circles, which probably isn't worth as much as you think. Probably in most situations, it's more like a gimmick - cool for about 5 seconds at a party.

Three, there are some pretty serious downsides. Check out Tim Ferris's article on it. TL;DR; is stalkers, death threats, extortion, media hit pieces, begging, impersonation, kidnapping, etc. All of the above can be especially difficult to deal with if you don't also have sufficient financial resources.

It depends what you do and do not consider to be the positive side of fame. If you're a famous writer, do you consider the opportunity to write books that lots of people will read into your calculation of fame? How about the money that comes from that? Or is fame just all the other shit?

I have heard that being famous is something you have to actively maintain, and it is not just something that happens without you being able to do anything about it. I think if you already are famous, and systematically begin to refuse every request to appear on TV, or attend a public event, or be interviewed for a newspaper, etc., then you will become not famous relatively quickly. So it would then follow that people who are famous are actively trying to be so, and that would indicate that they have made the calculation and decided that it is worth it for them.

That seems to apply to pundits, influencers, etc. They're continuously trying to get in the press.

But many artists, sportsmen, businessmen will actively try to be less famous. Naomi Osaka's meltdown about press availability, "I'm just here so I don't get fined," Elon Musk's efforts to shut down the plane tracking autism kid. JD Salinger's isolation was a stock plot point in thinly-fictionalized form for decades, Field of Dreams being the most famous example. Even the Divine Emperor Augustus, upon being told that he was being told that they were praying to him in temples in the provinces as a God, shot back asking what to do if people asked him to heal their gout.

I would hate being famous. I was involved in a local political campaign, in such a way that random people asked me about it in casual conversation, and I hated not being able to stop talking to them for fear of hurting the campaign. I can't imagine having that every day for the rest of my life. Luckily I'm high end mediocre at everything.

Even the Divine Emperor Augustus, upon being told that he was being told that they were praying to him in temples in the provinces as a God, shot back asking what to do if people asked him to heal their gout.

I mean, dude named himself "godlike". I don't think he really had grounds to complain.

Naomi Osaka seems to be a tennis player who has an Instagram account with 2,8 million followers, where she last posted a short video of herself 4 days ago. From what I can gather with some quick googling, her problem with the press conferences did not really have much (if anything) to do with being famous, just being contractually obligated to attend an event where she was subjected to questions that made her uncomfortable.

The plane tracking autism kid seems to be someone who poses for press photographs and gives interviews to various parties, probably anyone who will have him, trying to promote his various business ventures or social media projects. Or did you bring that up as an example of Elon Musk trying to be less famous? Because that does not seem plausible at all.

From a quick glance at Wikipedia, it seems that J.D. Salinger did not like to give interviews, but was giving one as soon as there was some copyright dispute that he was trying to influence.

The anecdote about emperor Augustus does not seem to be about him being famous, but about common people being silly.

There can be endeavours where being famous is required in order to succeed, and it can be an unpleasant surprise if you did not know it before hand, or you find out that you do not like being famous. But then it should be simple to just give up the thing, and anyone who does not probably has calculated that pursuing it is a net positive, despite having to be famous.

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