Fame has been on the mind ever since realizing that Dorothy Parker was friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald who was friends with Ernest Hemingway. These were amazing people for sure.

What exactly was unique about these three amazing folk that made them famous?

Nothing. They were living their lives and creating like millions of other talented artists.

The reason why they are famous is because Scott Fitzgerald incidentally created American propaganda, The Great Gatsby, depicting an American dream. Politics, the US government, made these artists as widely known as gospel, taught in every school in the country. This is not success as we imagine it, rather this is business as usual.

The fame we want and picture, to be known and seen by the world, it isn’t real. You are as famous as to the extent you live out your life in your world. You are as famous as to the amount you express yourself in your world.

Again with Dorothy, Scott, and Hemingway, this was a clique, a group of friends. Remember when you were in high school? And there were different groups of students? There was certainly an elitist group amongst the groups. If you weren’t in that group, you likely did not want to be. You did not want to be like those people. Fame is that elitist group. It’s just a group. It isn’t a metric to success. That group in high school may have had a connection to the school newsletter. This is the same as the famous group in our society.

There is a group of people that are famous in mainstream media simply because they are in that group. This group is no more or less than any other group of people in the world. They are no more or less qualified to be famous. It just so happens that one group is connected to infrastructure set up to broadcast their existence to millions of internet connected devices. There is no qualification for this.

Even when we understand this, some of us still want to be famous. Even when we know that fame is not success, some of us still want to be famous. Even when fame isn’t real, we still want it. Even when we understand that success is not real (different subject), we still want it!

We still want fame because other people still believe that fame is the measure of success, because we would like to impress them and make them proud by achieving fame. Is this a grave mistake? To achieve fame, does this not teach the wrong lesson to the eyes of all?

Does this not teach that others did something wrong to not achieve this fame, that they couldn’t figure out ‘the secret’ to fame (hint: there isn’t one), that they weren’t worthy of being seen or heard, acknowledged and valued?