Who in Their Right Mind Wouldn’t Want to be a Celebrity?

Don’t worry, it isn’t a trick question.

We tell our kids and each other that being a celebrity isn’t something to aspire to. They are vacuous, are “famous for being famous” and do nothing for society.

And yet, recent surveys show that at least half of teens and even pre-teens don’t want a career, they want to be famous. What is going on here?

We need look no further than the celebrities themselves. Recently it was announced that Channel Ten’s Bachelorette Sam Frost would be joining 2Day FM with Rove McManus as part of the new morning team. Getting a breakfast gig is the most coveted in radio, and Sam Frost clearly earned that position with all her years in…finance?

That’s right. Frost was offered the position people work years and years for because she was on a TV dating show. No radio credentials, no years of experience, no evidence whatsoever that she would even suit breakfast radio. The experience of her co-host only serves to highlight how much she stinks. Just a few days ago The Bachelor contestant Heather Maltman also made her TV hosting debut alongside a fellow reality tv contestand Joel Creasey, and it’s been widely reviewed as a disaster. Whoda thunk it, huh?

Another article broke recently about an Instagram celebrity (yes, there is such a thing) who is offered $2,000 for a picture of herself on Instagram with whatever product a company might wish her to spruik. As the article quotes her:

“I haven’t done anything for this success except put pictures of myself online,” O’Neill told her followers on one of her final YouTube videos.

The celebrity in question, Essena O’Neill, had an account that showed pictures of herself in various dresses, bikinis and so on, much like every other Instagram account featuring some woman in skimpy clothing. Thank heavens O’Neill at least had the self awareness and intelligence to say “I am definitely not a role model”.

To be more accurate though, she probably should have said “I definitely shoudn’t be a role model”, because the truth is, she is. She is a role model because she shows her half million plus fans how it is possible to live a ridiculously easy life. She shows people that as long as you are good looking and can amass followers by being good looking, that society and companies will reward you for it.

And then we have the number one example, that hideous family whose name starts with a K. You all know who I’m talking about. A family of reality TV stars who literally have no skills or experience in anything, yet are worth an estimated $300 million combined. All they do as far as anyone can tell is (arguably) look pretty and…that’s it?

Take a look at the book publishing world and you’ll see something similar. Just about every celebrity who’s been on TV for 5 minutes has a biography, or cookbook, or exercise book now. One of the women from The Real Housewives of Melbourne even has her own autobiography for Christ sake. If you look at the fiction section of the New York Times bestseller list, you’ll find books people want to read because of what is in them. Look on the non-fiction list, however, and you’ll see books people bought because of who wrote them. As an author I can even tell you, the standard advice for publishing a book now isn’t “develop your craft, work hard and write a really good book that people will want to read”, it’s “develop a profile, get lots of followers and then publish a book”. I’ve even heard it remarked multiple times that you don’t even need to be a good writer and that “writing has been democratised”. You can now write a bestseller and it’s purely because of your profile and connections, not because you’ve actually written anything decent. It makes me want to vomit.

People shake their heads at teenagers wanting to be celebrities. The fact that they do shows that they are paying attention — because who the hell would want to work a boring ass cubicle job with a crappy commute and annoying customers when you could live a life of no work, adoring followers, a platform to say whatever is on your mind knowing hundreds of thousands of people will listen, and getting showered with money and free stuff. We can’t expect people to aspire to things like serving the community, becoming police officers or curing cancer when we fawn over celebrities as though they are our overlords. We can’t expect people to want to become physicists when the finale of the latest reality TV show is a bigger deal than the Nobel Prize awards.

The hard truth is our children will stop wanting to be celebrities when we stop rewarding them.