works of wanderlust

The one-wayness of fame has got me thinking this past week.

Now, to be clear, I could all-too-easily frame this in a way that could come across as very sour grapes. I’m not trying to be sour about it, but rather just hold up an observation and say—huh, isn’t that a curious thing that we just sort of take for granted. Almost all of us do. Even me, mostly. Except when I get a thought stuck in my craw like: 

Fame is unidirectional.

—and weird and fickle and imbalanced in a million little ways and really a strange artifact of some aging post-democratic late-stage-capitalist hellscaape, if I’m being honest. But for my point today, fame is oddly unidirectional.

And if you don’t make stuff maybe you don’t even notice.

But chances are, and here’s the thing, you are almost certainly a person who exists and may be worthy of a certain share of attention for whatever effort it is that you make each day when you wake up and do whatever it is that you do to fill each of your days. Yet, chances are also great that whatever it is that you do—stocking shelves at a grocery store, helping people file their taxes, building kitchen cupboards, delivering hot food to people’s doors, or integrating complex banking software systems—no one is really paying attention.

On the other hand, certain people—famous people—go for coffee and wear a fashionable dress and there is a societal tidal wave of attention thown upon them. They make something, anything, and we all watch the trailer or throw money at the thing they made or sign up for notifications about it and give it our raw attention even before we know if its worth that all because of fame.

And like I said, you are sitting there reading that and thinking, well… yeah. That’s fame. That’s just how it works. 

And I’m sitting here writing and saying that, well sure, I know… but have you ever thought about how incredibly weird and strange that is?

And yeah, maybe you don’t even care that no one is paying attention to your life. Maybe even that’s an optimal outcome of your actions. No one fucking look at me, you’re thinking. 

Now. to be clear. I don’t even want to be famous. (That’s me saying that, believe it or not.) I’m not aiming for some kind of widespread name recognition or the attention and adulation of strangers around the world. That whole notion creeps me the hell out and I’m actually a fairly private guy who would crumble under the pressure of fame and too much attention.

Yet, there is a sweet spot somewhere between “literally no one notices or cares” and raw unflitered Taylor Swift ubiquity. I feel like with the quantity of effort that I’ve made over the years, the raw and unending production of effort that I put in—and here I want to tiptoe very carefully because I don’t want to say I deserve it or even that I’ve earned it, because I probably don’t and haven’t, but—there should be something more than nothing in this fame equation that we all take for granted. It’s just so unidirectional. 

And to be fair, that’s not even really what got me thinking about this.

I got to thinking about it because I was thinking about a piece of so-called advice that fluttered across my feed on social media suggesting that blah, blah, blah engagement in building a larger network of people was all about engaging back—and I thought to myself: you know what? The hell it is. Famous people, and here I mean truly famous people, don’t engage back. They are swamped by attention automatically. The rest of us claw for scraps.

I mean here’s the thing: I watched Pedro Pascal’s dystopic sci fi zombie show but has he ever done me the honor of reading any of my dystopian science fiction? I listened to Rainn Wilson’s podcast and he seems like a great guy and would probably have enjoyed listening to a bit of mine in return. Did they tho?

Tho even as I write it, and you read it, the whole premise sounds beyond absurd. Of course they haven’t—we’re both thinking it. That’s my point. The whole equation is unidirectional and we just take it all for granted. We don’t even question it, and you are likely shaking your head at the obnoxious notion I’m presenting. Who the fuck does this hoser think he is?!

Brad, you’re yelling at your screen. These people we adore have worked their whole lives on a craft that has elevated them above the rest of us, they are the faces of industrial complexes of creation that have systematically built empires of high quality content for the masses to consume. It is their very purpose and they have earned our adoration and attention, you say.

Sure.

And I’m just asking why we are taking all of that for granted.

Why haven’t we aspired to a meritocracy, even with the internet. Why haven’t more of us sought out unfamous voices with regularity? Why don’t we have systems that draw attention away even a little bit more strongly from the firehose of ugly fame and let a dribble escape for the rest of us? Or, if when we have made those systems in the past, why do we let them devolve into just another outlet for the already-famous. Arguably, social media could have been that but The Algorithms now decidedly shift attention to those who already have it, bootstrapping the pre-amplified voices into furies of inescapable commericalized, advertizing-laden sound so imbalanced that beyond a lottery of rare chance no one else can ever hope to be heard above it.

That’s just how it is, you say.

I know. I get it. I just—don’t.