The idea of fame has never appealed to me. As a child, I didn’t like acting or singing, which are two of the most typical routes to fame, enough to spend my life perfecting the craft. In recent years my disinterest has changed into an active avoidance.
Beyond knowing how an actor prepares for a role or what an athlete’s workout routine is, the public wants to know everything about their favorite celebrities. Harrison Ford admitted his naïvety, saying, “You never figure the cost of fame will be a total loss of privacy… It was unanticipated and I’ve never enjoyed it.” They don’t get to blend into the crowd. Closed doors are often infiltrated, metaphorically or literally. Gone are the days of going to the grocery store in sweatpants. Just got broken up with? Prepare yourself for probing questions seeking all the details of how, when and why it happened. Fame robs celebrities of privacy and anonymity.
The main issue with fame is the complete lack of privacy. Privacy is instinctually important- we wear clothes and try to come up with difficult- to- guess passwords- but how often do we think about why it is important? Politically-focused journalist Glenn Greenwald gives us one answer in his TED talk. He said human behavior becomes “vastly more conformist and compliant” if being monitored. Privacy allows for personal agency to trump societal expectations. Christians choose to use their agency to follow God and act more like Jesus Christ. Without privacy, this part of living out God’s calling would be much more difficult. More than just resistance to the norm, Greenwald tells us that private places are where “creativity, exploration and dissent exclusively reside.” Professional writers and artists must have to work very hard to carve out these necessary places.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m just as guilty as the next person. I love to know when celebrities are happily married, if they have kids or which castmates are friends once the cameras stop rolling. But we need to remember that we, as the audience, are not owed anything from their personal lives. Most of us aren’t actively stalking anyone and Wilmore is not crowded with celebrities, but online spaces stretch everywhere. Let’s all choose to not comment negative things or encourage inflammatory celebrity gossip with our clicks and likes.
The attention fame brings evades every part of someone’s life. Some people like getting recognized and being able to meet their fans. However, for all the praise celebrities get, the negative feedback they get is intense. Actress Megan Fox said to Esquire magazine, “Wwhatever your worst experience in high school, when you were being bullied by those ten kids in high school, fame is that, but on a global scale, where you’re being bullied by millions of people constantly.” Being permanently trapped in high school is a special type of awful situation, the only thing that could be worse is being permanently trapped in middle school.
These comments don’t just hurt, they jeopardize career opportunities. In an article from Psychology Today, Charles Figley, Ph.D., director of the Psychosocial Stress Research Program at Florida State University, said, “To be a celebrity means to have more than the usual assaults on one’s ego. You’re very vulnerable to the personal evaluations of other people. The public is ultimately in control of whether your career continues.” When or how you move up in your field is not based on how hard you work or even who you know and where you’re from, it’s based on how much people like you.
Famous entertainers are constantly evaluated for likeability and moral goodness, they can’t control their narrative. Celebrities aren’t just passively judged— every statement, public appearance and social media post is scrutinized. Does this celebrity speak out against discrimination in their field? Has so-and-so done anything for the humanitarian effort in Gaza? The answers to these questions and others like them hold too much power over the direction of their lives. Celebrities have to be obsessively devoted to the public to survive.
I value my privacy, agency and life trajectory too highly to give them up for notoriety and wealth. Perhaps fame could be reshaped. If celebrity interviews and events were less invasive and integral to their success, if their personalities weren’t carefully branded, if photographing people in public was discouraged or even illegal, then fame would be less suffocating. Until then, I will happily stay one of the unidentifiable faces in the crowd.