Fame is bad
Being a public figure? Thinking of other people as famous? Just say no!
I have been writing. We have all been writing. Some of the posts end up on the front page of Hacker News.
People tell us to think about building an audience. There are bloggers here with hundreds of thousands of followers and they want to tell us how to have hundreds of thousands of strangers read what we write, when two thousand strangers is already a psychological trial.
My sister’s books have sold hundreds of thousands of copies. She can’t read a single review online without getting so anxious that she spirals for a week.
People were not meant to be famous. I mean that in the sense that I don’t think that anyone is psychologically equipped for it. It’s not even about scale and the internet — cults can be small and everyone can know each other, and yet the thing they are doing to their cult leaders is (I think) the same bad thing as fame.
People function when they are bound into reciprocal relationships with other people. Reciprocal as in both parties have accountability to each other. Why are there so many cult leaders who somehow make the transition from trying to share spiritual insights to sexually abusing hordes of young women? Why are movie stars and other celebrities so likely to be sexual predators? I don’t think they set out with that intention, usually. I think they do it because they find that they can. In the absence of the consequences that come with reciprocal relationships, there’s no check on their impulses. When you become famous it’s not just that other people dehumanize you. You dehumanize yourself.
What are we even doing with these famous writers
There are a bunch of writers here who are famous within our circles. We hold events where they just talk about whatever, and people hang on their words.
We are encouraged to send our blog posts to these well-known writers to get feedback. On the one hand this makes sense, because they must be good at writing, or they wouldn’t have gotten so popular. On the other hand, I have negative desire to do it.
I was so starstruck the first time I met some of these people. Ten years ago I wrote a fan email to one of them, and when we met in person I couldn’t believe it. Since then I’ve seen many, many people come up to him just to tell him that he changed their life. It’s strange to see them walking up to a person who is an idol to them, and who was once an idol to me too, who I now know is just some guy.
When I was twenty-one and very intellectually insecure, I met another one of these famous bloggers, and I came away thinking that he was simply smarter and more knowledgeable than me in every domain. I spoke to him this month for the first time since then, and realized that he likes to direct the conversation to topics he knows well. In some kind of absolute sense I’m sure he is smarter than me, but that doesn’t make him somehow more than me.
Maybe I’m making a mistake in not seeking feedback from these writing experts. But I know what I am doing and what I am writing, and I don’t feel like they know that better than I do. For example, I know that this post is stream of consciousness and kind of shit.
People’s belief in their own fame distorts the social environment
I have known an alarming number of people in my time who were approximately cult leaders. One of them in particular held himself in this really intense way, with an intense stare. Someone told me that he had once stayed on their floor, and they had no buy-in to his community, so to them, he was just a man holding himself in this weirdly intense way, while commanding no power or respect. But when I was within his social world, his intensity worked, even if I could see it for the act it was. It scared me, because it had real power.
Maybe it’s a self-fulfilling illusion, but I think some of the people here who are Twitter famous or whatever move through the physical world differently. They have some kind of confidence and unrealness. Maybe aloofness? I do not actually know who they are because I don’t use the internet, but their perception of their own specialness affects me.
Someone here wrote once about having more gravity in a room than other people, due to being more famous. Ever since then I haven’t been able to put it out of my mind when I’m in the same space as her, even when it’s at a friend’s house in a situation where her fame is completely irrelevant. It makes it so much harder to interact with her that I mostly just don’t.
Being a public figure is bad
There are modes of fame that are easier and harder on human psychology. It’s one thing if many people have seen your work. But once it becomes you who is famous, not your work, it’s different. When people are paying attention to everything you do and say, of course your sense of your own importance grows. You are correctly noticing that your actions and words have more power. But it’s easy to conflate this with your actions and words and thoughts being inherently more special and important than those of others.
I recommend avoiding being a public figure if at all possible. People read my sister’s books but they don’t know what she looks like, what her life is like, her opinions on most things. She does not live publicly on the internet and no one can make her engage. My sister is lucky to be able to do this, because she happens to be a writer, and not someone who must appear in front of people in order to ply their craft, like an actor or a singer or an athlete.
I have spent a lot of time in fandom, where I like to read and write and look at art about fictional people. But sometimes those fictional people are played by real actors, and fans blur the lines. I brought this up once in a small fandom server of people I knew reasonably well. I said it made me uncomfortable seeing people thirst over pictures of an actor, who is a real and private person. The reaction was dismissal: that he knows the photos exist and has implicitly consented to having people thirst over him.
I can’t stop other people from masturbating to pictures of celebrities, writing RPF (iykyk), engaging in parasocial relationships, or having people engage in parasocial relationships with them.
All I can say is, maybe think about what it’s doing to you when you think of other people—or yourself—as famous. When you’re around people who you think of as famous, how do you interact with them? If you are a public figure, how do you relate to that?
If you are writing online and worrying about growing your audience, why? What is it that you actually want? Is it money? Influence?
Do you really want to be a public figure?
I recently read a book with the subtitle “how attention became the world’s most endangered resource”, and it talked about how fame has become an increasingly common terminal goal. An “influencer” is just someone who lots of people pay attention to.
Here at this blogging retreat, the people who are being held up as paragons of writing skill are necessarily skilled in not only writing, but growing and maintaining an audience. They have done this in ways ranging from writing footnote-riddled 15,000-word deep dives on obscure topics, to being edgy on Twitter, but they have all done it. And so there is some implicit assumption in many conversations that we all must want to capture attention, to grow our own audience. I don’t really care to do that. We are all here for our own reasons, and my goal has never been to have reach.
But some of us here have been stumbling into fifteen minutes of Hacker News fame, and so being read by thousands of strangers is something we must grapple with, whether we planned to or not.