Weirdly, people will take the route of becoming famous just so that they can be seen.
Seen as in, being acknowledged that they exist, are important, they matter, and that their voice carries weight in the world.
All of the validation that makes the point of a circle see itself as the whole circle, so to speak.
There's a subtle difference between being wanted for who you've become versus being valued for who you really are.
I don't think it's a matter of trading one for the other, but more so changing in a way that's not aligned with your core self.
If the pursuit of recognition begins to reshape not just your output but your fundamental values and instincts, you begin to risk losing the very authenticity that made your work compelling in the first place.
Now, it's very debatable on whether who you really are ever changes.
Open Field Of Definition
I personally think it depends on the viewpoint one is looking at this situation from.
People change all the time, in that they're experiencing different and myriad of thoughts/emotions that influences what they say or do.
A novelist who writes their first book at twenty-five is processing entirely different life experiences than when they publish their tenth book at fifty, for example.
And this constant dynamic could overtime seep into bringing out deeper changes that fundamentally changes who they really are, which somehow seems consistent with this concept of evolution as a natural law.
According to history, ancient people were dealing with the same fundamental human questions about purpose, meaning, and identity that we grapple with today, yet their social structures, belief systems, and daily realities were vastly different.
Did this make them different people at their core, or were they the same human nature expressed through different circumstances?
There's also an attending conflict that you can't tell who you really are changes if you can't first define who you really are.
It's a classic philosophical catch-22 that has puzzled thinkers for millennia.
More Doing, Less Being
It's not uncommon to ask people who are you and they go on to tell you what they do.
Mostly, what they do is their profession, the role or function they possess in society.
We're action-oriented creatures who find it easier to define ourselves through our outputs than to examine our inner landscapes.
It's way simpler to say "I make videos" than to articulate "I'm someone who sees patterns in chaos and feels compelled to share that clarity with others."
From that sense, if a doctor changes into a teacher, then have they become a fundamentally different person, or have they simply found a new channel for the same underlying drive to help others?
In some ways, this puts an interesting twist on whether a creator can be separated from his/her creation.
One But Not The Same
The traditional argument for separation suggests that art should stand on its own merit, independent of the artist's personal life or character.
Creators are attached to their creation, they just can't help it. It's part of their DNA, a way of processing the world.
At the same time, they seek to be independent from the work they create simply because they want their work to be judged on its own merits while also simultaneously hoping it will reveal something meaningful about who they are.
But it ends up being exactly that, a contradiction, as the act of creation is also an act of self-revelation.
Even when creators try to hide behind fictional characters or abstract concepts, their worldview and obsessions always bleeds through onto what they've created.
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