You don't need to be famous to be successful

Yep, really her. But also an illusion. (Photo by Ed Feingersh, 1955)

This week, another celebrity who loudly gave up on Twitter returned to Twitter.

That’s perfectly understandable. The pain of being criticized by legions of strangers is the price she’s willing to pay for the adulation of other strangers. It’s a deal she’s happy to agree to, especially when it comes on the classic intermittent reinforcement schedule that keeps gamblers addicted to making bets.

How many of those zillions of followers wish they were in this celebrity’s shoes? Many, judging by the prevalence of reality TV and all the wannabe “influencers” on social media. Fame becomes another proxy for happiness, despite the obvious evidence that fame actually destroys people’s lives and psyches. We need to see fame as the chimera that it is instead of being seduced by it.

Now, most of us are not in a position to, for instance, have our adolescence ruined by being on The Mickey Mouse Club. But I see people every day who are harmed by their desire to be held in esteem by others. It happens in classrooms where kids say mean things about other kids to make other kids think that they are cool. It happens on Instagram, where people sell their children’s faces for likes. It happens anywhere that people feel bad about themselves because they’re not getting as much attention as others they look up to. It’s sad and confusing, and it actually does not have to be a necessary part of growing up or being a successful artist or business owner.

It’s not hard to see how being recognized on the street stops being fun after awhile. If you spend any time thinking about what it’s like to be very famous—the freedoms you lose, the challenge of finding genuine loving relationships, the pressure of being a public figure under scrutiny—it’s not actually very attractive. It kills people. And yet so many of us crave the supposed glamour of celebrity. What we need to do is figure out what this fame—or its more accessible cousin, popularity—really means to us. What are we truly seeking?

When we dig into it, we might see that what we want is money (of course, money, in itself, is usually a proxy for something else that we want). It might be love. It might be companionship. It might be respect or acclaim. It might be that there is a cause we believe in, and we want to raise awareness of it. It might be revenge against someone who hurt us. It might just be that we’re intrigued by the challenge. Whatever the desire behind our desire for popularity, we’d be better off addressing that directly than to seek fame for its own sake.

There’s nothing intrinsically meaningful about hitting 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 followers on a social media platform. However, I hear from people all the time who have specific targets like this that they want to reach as a measure of their success. Great—you can get there with pictures of boobs or baby animals. A certain number of followers is not an end in itself, and shouldn’t be the goal. Whatever followers you have are simply the result of actions you’ve taken. What are the actions that are meaningful for you to take? Most won’t have mass appeal and be shared and discussed by thousands of people. That doesn’t mean that they don’t have value to the people who matter most.

I know I can’t convince middle schoolers to not care what their peers think of them, but I do try to help them see that who they are is enough. Their value as a human being cannot be measured, ranked, or compared against others. For us adults, struggling to create a legacy they are proud of in a noisy world, the same is true. We don’t have to be famous to count, and we don’t have to constantly seek more.

Many of my readers are old enough to remember Baby Jessica, who was dramatically rescued after she fell down a well in Midland, Texas in 1987. As a toddler, she met President George H.W. Bush and had a TV movie made about her accident. But Jessica, now Jessica McClure Morales, is unfazed by her fame and at no point has ever sought to capitalize on it. She’s a wife and mother who lives a quiet, fulfilling life not far from where she grew up. She carries a few physical scars but no memory of the incident that captured worldwide attention. She’s as down to earth as it gets and has no need for the spotlight, though she tolerates it well. Her near-death experience gave her an appreciation of her life exactly as it is. Honestly, hers is an example I aspire to follow.

We are worthy even if we’re unknown. We have value even if we don’t show up on the front page when someone googles us. We don’t need to be famous to be successful, and we don’t need to be popular to be loved. You can test it out both ways to see if what I’m saying is true, but I don’t recommend it.