Isio Knows Better: Famous

I sincerely lay no claims to being more knowledgeable than anyone, but I do confess that I know better than I did yesterday, last year and a decade ago.

Isio Knows Better is an attempt to capture the shocking and highly entertaining conversation within myself. The conversations between my mind (the sharp witty one), my soul (the lover and the spiritual one) and my body (the playful one concerned with the more mundane things of life). She is the eternal referee between the caustic mind and the sensitive soul. This is Isio. So, here’s to making private conversations public.

Enjoy!

What would you say to someone you knew and all they wanted to be in life was to be famous? I must confess that at intrinsic level I have pondered this. How would you prepare them for the reality of this desire? Like everything in life, fame has two sides. Thirteen years I have been in the entertainment industry, have had a front-row seat into the glory of fame, and seen the crash of many who were once considered glorious.

Perhaps then, an objective view into why YOU want to be famous. How have you prepared yourself for this experience? Do you know what it will cost you? Yes, the society and the media do an elaborate job of explaining the merits of fame. But this will be your reality. Are you ready?

Stumbling into this article in philosophersmail.com has got to be one of the most objective and accurate representation into the reality of fame. It is titled, Your Desire to be Famous- and the Problems it would Bring You.

Enjoy some excerpts!

“We don’t always feel comfortable admitting it to our friends; it is embarrassing. But, secretly, the idea of being famous has great appeal. Fame is deeply attractive because it seems to offer very significant benefits.

The fantasies go like this: when you are famous, your good reputation will precede you. You will get warm smiles from admiring strangers. Fame will mean other people will be flattered and delighted {by you}. They will be amazed to see you in the flesh. They’ll ask to take a photo with you. They’ll sometimes laugh nervously with excitement. No one will be able to afford to upset you. When you’re not pleased with something, it will become a big problem for others. If you say your hotel room isn’t up to scratch, the management will panic. Your complaints will be taken very seriously. Your happiness will become the focus of everyone’s efforts. {Others include groupies, great sex, lots of money and free stuff}.

…The desire for fame has its roots in the experience of neglect, in injury. No one would want to be famous who hadn’t, somewhere in the past, been made to feel extremely insignificant. We sense the need for a great deal of admiring attention when we have been painfully exposed to earlier deprivation.

What is common to all dreams of fame is that being known to strangers emerges as a solution to a hurt. It presents itself as the answer to a deep need to be appreciated, and treated decently by other people.

And yet fame cannot accomplish what is asked of it.

It does have advantages, which are evident. But it also introduces a new set of very serious disadvantages. Every new famous person who disintegrates, breaks down in public or loses their mind is judged in isolation, rather than being interpreted as a victim of an inevitable pattern within the pathology of fame.

One wants to be famous out of a desire for kindness. But the world isn’t generally kind to the famous for very long. The reason is basic: the celebrity of a few people will always contrast painfully with the obscurity of the many. Being famous upsets people. For a time, the resentment can be kept under control, but it is never somnolent for very long. When we imagine fame, we forget that it is inextricably connected to being too visible in the eyes of some…

So soon enough, the world will start to go through the rubbish bags of the famous, it will comment negatively on their appearance, it will pour over their setbacks, it will judge their relationships, it will mock {them}.

Fame makes people more, not less, vulnerable, because it throws them open to unlimited judgement. Everyone is wounded by a cruel assessment of their character or merit. But the famous have an added challenge in store. The assessments will come in from legions of people who would never dare to say to their faces what they can now express from the safety of the newspaper office or screen. We know from our own lives that a nasty remark can take a day or two to process.

Social media hasn’t helped. It’s made it far easier than before to be famous. And therefore, by necessity, far easier to be hated. A minor celebrity can now regularly face all the vitriol previously accorded only to Hollywood stars.

Psychologically, the famous are of course the very last people on earth to be well equipped to deal with what they’re going through. After all, they only became famous because they were wounded, because they had thin-skin… And now far from compensating them, fame aggravates it exponentially. Strangers will voice their negative opinions in detail, unable or simply unwilling to imagine that famous people bleed far more quickly than anyone else. They might even think the famous aren’t listening (though one wouldn’t become famous if one didn’t suffer from a compulsion to listen too much).

Every {secret insecurity and} worst fear about oneself will daily be actively confirmed by strangers. One will be exposed to the fact that people one has never met, about whom one would have only goodwill, actively loathe one. One will learn that detestation of one’s personality is – in some quarters – a badge of honour. Sometimes the attacks will be horribly insightful. At other times, they’ll make no sense to anyone who really knows one. But the criticisms will lodge in people’s minds nevertheless – and no lawyer, court case or magician can ever delete them.

Needless to say, as a hurt celebrity, one won’t be eligible for sympathy. The very concept of a hurt celebrity is a joke, about as moving for the average person as the sadness of a tyrant.

To sum up: fame really just means you get noticed a great deal – not that you get understood, appreciated or loved.

The aim that lay behind the desire for fame remains important. One does still want to be appreciated and understood. But the wise person accepts that celebrity does not actually provide these things. Appreciation and understanding are only available through individuals one knows and cares about, not via groups of a thousand or a million strangers. There is no shortcut to friendship – which is what the famous person is in effect seeking.

We should pay great attention to the fact that, today, so many people (particularly young ones) want to be famous – and even see fame as a necessary condition for a successful life. Rather than dismiss this wish, we should grasp its underlying worrying meaning. The {burning} desire for fame is a sign that an ordinary life has ceased to be good enough.

The solution is not to encourage ever more people to become famous, but to put massive efforts into encouraging a greater level of politeness and consideration for everyone, in families and communities, in workplaces, in politics, in the media, at all income levels, especially modest ones. A healthy society will give up on the understandable but erroneous belief that fame might guarantee {happiness and} the kindness of strangers”.

…………..

What do you think? What would  your advice be to a famous person/ fame addict?