Fame Is Just the Tax

I don't want to be famous. I actively dislike the idea of being known just to be known.

But to change anything, you have to communicate. You have to say something. And if you say it loudly enough, or for long enough, people notice.

That's the trade, and nobody explains it to you before you're standing inside it.

The Tax

I want to make things that matter. I want people to feel something, to be part of a shift, to see the thing a little differently afterward.

To do that, in this era, you have to be seen.

And being seen feels like selling out, right up until you examine why. You wanted connection and collaboration. What the mechanism offers is attention, which is a different substance wearing similar clothes.

Or maybe that's a justification I built so I could do the thing I don't want to do. I genuinely can't tell from in here. Both readings survive the evidence.

Either way, silence would be preferable, and we don't live in a time that rewards it.

Everyone Is Talking. Almost Nobody Is Listening.

Here's the part that makes the trade worse than it sounds.

Most communication now is one way. You send something out, and the world holds its breath, and then nothing comes back. Not because people are cruel, but because everyone is transmitting at the same time and the listening capacity never scaled with the broadcasting capacity.

Sherry Turkle has spent decades documenting this specific failure, and the finding in Alone Together is the uncomfortable one: we've engineered ourselves into constant contact and less actual conversation. The devices give us connection without the friction that makes connection mean anything.

The metrics tell the story on their own. We used to trade in follows and likes, which at least implied a person on the other end deciding something. Now it's impressions and views. If people viewed it, that counts as dialogue.

In a way, it is. It's just a very thin way.

The Part Where You Become the Brand

So where does that leave the people who want to make good work, engage in something like a conversation, and skip the spotlight entirely?

Erving Goffman worked this out in 1956, long before any of the current machinery existed. His argument is that social life runs on front stage and back stage: a performed self for the audience, and a private one where you stop performing. Everyone does it. It isn't dishonest, it's how being a person in public works.

What changed isn't the performing. It's that the front stage now runs continuously and gets measured, so the performed version accumulates evidence and starts to feel more real than the other one.

That's the thing I actually resist. Not visibility. Becoming the brand.

Susan Cain made the case in Quiet that we built our institutions around an extrovert ideal, so we systematically confuse volume with value and presence with competence. Which means the discomfort here isn't a personal failing. It's a mismatch with a system that only knows how to reward one register.

What I Landed On

Do it anyway.

Make the thing, say the thing, let it reach whoever it reaches. If that produces some visibility, fine. The fame isn't the point. The work is the point. The communication is the point. The connection, even when it's messy and one-sided and filtered through a screen, is still the point.

I keep telling myself: keep talking, keep making, keep showing up.

Though I'll be honest, I don't know whether that's advice or just me negotiating with the discomfort until it agrees to let me work.

And I want to end on "don't confuse attention with intention," because it sounds right and it scans well. I don't think it's that clean. They blur. You start with the work and end up watching the numbers, and the shift doesn't announce itself when it happens.

So the only thing I'd actually claim is smaller than a principle: watch for the moment the numbers start choosing what you make.

That's the tax coming due. You just don't get an invoice.