When you’re a child, many times the only rich people you know are famous people. You might make the correlation, causation fallacy, where you think that wealthy and notoriety go hand in hand.
As you grow older, you learn about more obscure wealthy people. You start to realize that the Venn diagram isn’t perfect. There are many famous people who are not wealthy. There are many wealthy people who are not famous.
It’s not an and, it’s an either or situation. You can have fame without wealth (the worst combination), wealth without fame (best), or wealth and fame (the middle option).
Two Bill Murray quotes come to mind:
“I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: ‘try being rich first.’ See if that doesn’t cover most of it. There’s not much downside to being rich, other than paying taxes and having your relatives ask you for money. But when you become famous, you end up with a 24-hour job. . . . The only good thing about fame is that I’ve gotten out of a couple of speeding tickets. I’ve gotten into a restaurant when I didn’t have a suit and tie on. That’s really about it.”
Bill Murray
“The best thing about being famous is getting good tables at restaurants.”
Billy Murray
Charli XCX on her substack of the advantages of fame:
One of the main realities of being a pop star is that at a certain level, it’s really fucking fun. You get to go to great parties in a black SUV and you can smoke cigarettes in the car and scream out of the sunroof and all that cliche shit. At these parties you sometimes get to meet interesting people and those interesting people often actually want to meet you.
You get to wear fabulous clothes and shoes and jewelry that sometimes comes with its own security guard who trails you around the party making sure you don’t lose the extortionate earrings sitting on your lobes or let some random person you’ve just met in the bathroom try on the necklace around your neck that is equivalent to the heart of the ocean. You get good free shit like phones and laptops and vinyl and trips and shroom gummies and headphones and clothes and sometimes even an electric bike that will sit in your garage untouched for the best part of 5 years.
You get to enter restaurants through the back entrance and give a half smile to the head chef (who probably hates you) and the waiters (who probably hate you too) as they sweat away doing an actual real service industry job while you strut through the kitchen with your 4 best friends who are tagging along for the ride. You get to feel special, but you also have to at points feel embarrassed by how stupid the whole thing is.
Charli XCX
I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.
Jim Carrey