How to tell you're Famous (you aren't)

What is fame? Don’t bother with those pesky dictionaries, poindexter, I’ve got the real scoop right here. If you’re famous, a great deal of people know your name, and thoughts of you pop up in their minds as they go about their daily lives. That’s literally it.

There are many ways to attain fame, not all of which require skill or talent, but real fame is always apparent to a conscious observer. Fame is fickle, yes, but regardless of whether someone is famous now or was famous 30 years ago, it doesn’t change the fact that they will have, at some point of their lives, been famous.

How does one become famous, then? Well, the most obvious answer is to do something of note. Become the leader of a nation. Perform a hit single. Go to the moon. Save millions of people (or kill them). Change the way that people do business and/or live their lives. Lead a decades-long successful movie career. Run a slew of successful marketing campaigns revolving around yourself. The list is seemingly endless.

You’ll notice that everything on that list requires effort in some form or another, and it requires you keep people’s attention. You know what is not on that list? TikTok. Instagram. Vine. Those idiotic websites and apps wherein the main, or the only, “activity”, is endless scrolling. No engagement, no emotions, no interaction, just look and scroll. No thinking, either. Just see something for 5 seconds and then move on to the next thing.

Now, you might see people with millions of followers on apps like Instagram. You might even be impressed, but what’s impressive about that? Having millions of fans is impressive, but followers are not the same as fans. Far from it. A fan is someone who wants to see more of a creator, or who otherwise cares about someone or something. If your average Instagram or TikTok ‘creator’ stopped uploading tomorrow, most of their followerbase wouldn’t even notice.

Fame is when you live rent-free in someone’s head. Someone who used to do as such is someone who used to be famous. Having a bunch of people see your photos or videos during their mindless, emotionless, hours-long scrolling sessions, before promptly leaving their minds or never even entering them, is not fame. It’s even worse than fame, because rather than working on somehow actually becoming famous, the “creator” deludes themselves into thinking that people actually care about them, until one day, they put their delusions to the test, and slam head-first into the reality that pretty much no-one actually gives a shit about “celebrity” on TikTok or Instagram.