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Posted By: Stephanie Brown

Imagine it; private jets, Cristal on tap, all the plastic surgery and designer clothing you could ever need or want… It would be great to be a celebrity, wouldn’t it? Not only would your fantastic wealth allow you to do anything and go anywhere you wanted to go, any time, but your fame would mean everywhere you travelled you would be treated as royalty. It’s a far cry from slogging 9-5 for the minimum wage, or even for a fairly decent wage for that matter.  No wonder so many of us are obsessed with the dream of becoming a celebrity.

Anyone who has ever worked hard to make a living will snort in derision when I say this but do you ever think that maybe their lives aren’t so much better than ours after all? I mean, what do they have that we don’t? When it comes to wealth, studies have shown that even lottery winners’ happiness levels return to normal after just three years. That means that if they were depressed before they won the lottery, they return to being depressed again after three years. If they were relatively happy, they’ll still just be relatively happy.

I would agree that after a certain point money and possessions become effectively meaningless. If you could have absolutely anything in the world that you wanted, would you really still want anything? I think then it would quickly become clear that happiness really comes from life fulfillment and the relationships we have with our loved ones.

Of course, you’d think that being a beautiful and world famous celebrity would make it easy to find love, right? So even ignoring the money, you’d still rather be a celebrity? It seems to me that if you make yourself a commodity, you’ll be treated like one. People will want to know you and be seen with you for your fame and money only. I imagine most relationships you had from then on would become pretty superficial, not to mention the legions of sycophants who would be willing to agree with your every word and the kiss-and-tell specialists looking to seduce you. And all the while the public waits with bated breath for you to make an ass of yourself. Does that really still sound good to you?

Perhaps this acerbic quote from Leonardo DiCaprio will help to hammer it home; “People want you to be a crazy, out-of-control teen brat. They want you to be miserable, just like them. They don’t want heroes; what they want is to see you fail.”

But we just hate it when celebrities start complaining about fame, don’t we? Try working a shift in McDonalds, we think, you self-absorbed morons. Katy Perry has recently been lambasted for doing just this, after saying “I’m tired of being famous already! But I’m not tired of creating. Fame is, I think, just a disgusting by-product of what I do. It’s quite a delicate creature – it’s a wild animal of sorts. It can lost you, and then it can attack you.”

There are plenty more celebrities who are known for their complaining prowess; Kristen Stewart, Jennifer Aniston and Avril Lavigne, to name just a few, have all been known to take a few pops at the beast that is fame. Admittedly, it does gall a little, especially as you read their quotes in the gossip pages on the bus while on your way to an unsatisfying job that you must do to pay the rent or keep the kids in clothes.

Maybe we should all take heart a little in the fact that maybe we don’t have superstar wealth, but at least we can take comfort in the real human relationships that are, after all, the thing that makes life worth living.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t dream, for just a little while, of what it would be like.

Stephanie Brown is a freelance writer from the UK who loves traveling, photography, and old films. She lives in Glasgow with her boyfriend and a brand new kitten named Lucy.