How famous should a writer be?

name and face recognition, considered

It’s a gorgeous late summer swoon in New York and I am couch-ridden because I absolutely decimated my ankle playing pickup basketball on Saturday. Getting old is brutal and I should maybe stop playing recreational sports. So all that being said, I’ve spent this weekend watching football and writing about a phenomenon related to the “second pivot to video” I wrote about a few weeks ago.

Gore Vidal on the Dick Cavett Show

People who want to be famous have something wrong with them. I don’t mean that they’re like trying to paper over an insecurity or deal with some deeply rooted neuroses, I mean that the pursuit of fame is a symptom of a potentially undiagnosed emotional disorder that has resulted in a desire in not wanting to be able to go to the grocery store or the bookstore without a stranger asking for a selfie. That shouldn’t be mistaken for saying that famous people are uniformly insane or psychotic, just that going about your life such that your goal is to be a famous person signals something rotten in your soul and/or brain.

I often wonder if, say, influencers all want to be famous or if they just want to reach a certain level of noticeableness that earns them free trips and PR packages from desperate brands. The need to accrue followers and foster engagement seems more a means to an end than some sort of cursed fishing hook pulling them through the lifestream. Is wanting to be recognizable by 30,000 people categorically different than wanting to be recognizable by 30,000,000 people? Are those numbers connected on a straight line in the brain an influencer? Or is at one end of the scale a job where you look at a camera and the other defined by some grotesque and extreme need for attention? Do they have the sickness? Or are they just making practical decisions under the duress of modern life, and using the tools at their disposal?

I’m wondering the same thing about writers right now.