Fame at any price?

A woman in New Jersey wants to become the fattest woman in the world. According to reports on ABC news, she plans to double her weight over the next two years. In January, a woman was sent to prison for cruelty after trying to get attention for having the illest child in the world. Her son was confined to a wheelchair and fed through a tube in his stomach, even though there was nothing wrong with him.

Our desire for celebrity has escalated beyond the bounds of what is reasonable or manageable. As has our thirst for the celebrity lifestyle. Easy debt has allowed us to drive movie star cars and wear Chanel sunglasses we can’t afford. We can accessorise like Cheryl Cole, so we feel bad if we don’t. The Me Too element of celebrity is a bit like cosmetic surgery: for five grand you could have a perfect nose, so you start thinking you should. This way of thinking is causing not only debt (and a generation of women who all look alike), but also widespread unhappiness. ‘What happens when the aspirations that are held out for us by our role models are simply not attainable?’ says psychotherapist Sue Cowan-Jenssen. ‘We need realistic and achievable goals. Carefully manufactured images, be they social or physical, can make us feel that we are not rich or beautiful enough.’

A new study by economists Curtis Eaton and Mukesh Eswaran in Economic Journal shows that, in wealthier nations, when the rich indulge in conspicuous status purchases such as cars and jewellery, everyone else feel worse by comparison, because they can’t compete. Oliver James has written about how affluence has become a sickness in western societies, causing depression and anxiety as people increasingly measure themselves against wealthy celebrities with whom they can’t keep up.

‘There is evidence that our interest in celebrity threatens to get out of hand in times of crisis, when we feel vulnerable and bad about ourselves,’ says Cowan-Jenssen. ‘At some level, we all yearn for the adoration and attention paid to the famous and successful. It goes back to our earliest feelings: ‘Mummy look at ME’. Many of us do not get enough of that sort of attention and it has been suggested that it is this lack that drives people to become celebrities in the first place.’ One look at the celebrity lives playing out in the media (Tiger Woods, John Terry, Cheryl Cole) will tell us that fame doesn’t bring unbridled happiness. Especially if you have to eat your body weight in doughnuts to get it.