Mr. Gaiman, what's the best thing being famous?
I don't think there is one. It's pretty awful. I'd trade it for being unknown any day.
No matter how many famous people talk about how being famous sucks, our social order still worships at the altar of fame and still sees fame as this Thing To Be Sought At All Costs.
Like, even billionaires--who could live happily on their anonymous yachts--seek public attention, and are willing to spend lavishly to experience fame (think of the Starbucks CEO, whose name I hilariously cannot remember, who paid hundreds of millions of dollars to run for President, even though everyone knew he would never become President).
But being famous does suck. It's just (for me anyway) very hard to stop seeking even after you recognize it sucks. Like, Tony Hawk once said that he'd done all the drugs and the worst of them by far was fame, and that has been my experience as well. It's a drug. If a little attention feels good, more must feel better. If the attention makes you feel miserable, or you feel withdrawal when it isn't in your life, that must be because you don't have enough of it, and if you just had a little more, then you would feel the thrill of it again, when in reality it just makes you sicker and sicker.
Now, having enough money, which I do, is a huge huge huge privilege, especially in a late-stage capitalist society, because wealth is the closest one can feel to secure in a society that runs on precarity. But wealth and fame have become decoupled of late; there are famous tiktokers making minimum wage. And the fame part of being famous? It's a really destructive force in the lives of people who experience it, and yet often they cant stop seeking it, just as we all often continue to seek stuff that have become destructive.
