Fame

Part 1: What got me thinking about it

One afternoon, when I was about 6 or 7 years old, while I was passively listening to a man on TV talking about sports, my mother, who was sitting beside me, quietly told me that she knew the man on TV. My first thought was “Wow! My mom knows a famous person!” Or more to the point, I thought, “Wow! A famous person knows my mom!”

I asked my mom how she knew him. She told me they had known each other when they were younger, living in the same city. If I remember correctly, she even said that our family knew their family well. She told me how he had worked very hard and was now a very famous person on TV.

I immediately asked her, “How come he’s famous and you’re not?”

Though I had asked this with the innocent curiosity of a child, it immediately occurred to me that I might have come off as somewhat rude. My mom being my mom, calmly said, “It’s about our choices. He chose the path that he wanted and I chose the path that I wanted.”

Seeing that my mom was open to discussion about this, I asked, “So you never wanted fame?”

“No,” she said, looking straight into my eyes.

I was struck by how secure she was in her answer. Until that point, I had thought that everyone wanted fame. This is the message that I had internalised from books, TV, news and pretty much everyone’s eyes as they lit up during discussions about a famous person.

This was the first time that I was observing someone who seemed completely disinterested in fame. It seemed like such an anomaly that I questioned how truthful she was being. Might she have said this because she never got the fame she secretly desired? Didn’t everyone want to be famous?

Over the years though, I understood the depth of sincerity in the answer she had given and how indifferent she was to the idea of fame. While she could talk about the fame of others and assign some positive value to it (depending on what made them famous), she didn’t seem to care about being famous herself.

She also never led me to believe that fame was a goal that I would find worth chasing. This was in stark contrast to the lessons I was learning from many others.

Are there a lot more people like her? I do know some people who share an ethos similar to my mom’s, but I find them to be the minority. Most seem to elevate fame to some glorious, exalted state worth its weight in celebrity.

Is it though?

To get some sense of this, I think I need to properly understand what is even meant by fame.

Changelog:

originally written on 25 October 2023