Famous not equal Rich
Would you rather be rich and unknown or poor and famous? This could seem a stupid question but understanding the answer can help us make a model about how modern society has a weird correlation with money and fame. While having money can let you be less anxious and economically independent, I cannot understand the pros of only being famous. "We crave attention over freedom"
Being famous in the digital era
ciao
A lot of people nowadays, in the era of narcissism, are craving to be famous only for the joy of being recognized and appreciated (so sad).
How often do we see people ridicule themselves just for the sake of having this spotlight on themselves for a millisecond on their head? Why they do that, money or fame?
If you open YouTube or TikTok it's full of social-network climbers that instead of reaching a higher social class they want to reach your landing page. We can obviously say that they do that to be noticed, but do they do this for getting richer too? Sure! Let's not forget that first of living in a narcissistic society, we're living in a late-stage capitalist one, so we can say that making content and trying to reach as many people as we can is a way to reach "the attention" and use that for making money too.
Why do people want to become famous?
I think that the main reason for this attention plague is related to how being more connected leads us to be more dissociated to social life. We can say that this is not that different to social dynamics associated with money. Why do we love luxury and being rich? We don’t love it because we can achieve freedom or help poor people; we do it because being rich means power, power over other people. So, just like money, fame it's a way to go higher on the pyramid of command but, instead o having a stairs made of money, in most cases, it's made of narcissism, lies and self-sabotage.
So, if we want to be the neo-futuristic “alpha person” we think we deserve to be and gain power in this beautiful society, we need to become rich and famous.
How to become rich and famous
If you want to become famous - not going on the news as a killer - you have two roads:
- Good communication
- Become a meme
If you're good at communicating you will go higher, but this is a slow road and in the current world, hard working is not a virtue. We don't have time and we're not that good at making good content so, we want to be famous NOW. If we need to achieve this goal, the fastest road is to become a meme, but maybe it's not even the easiest. It's like saying "It's easier to make one million betting or making a company?". In the sense of something that can be replicated and is directly proportional to our hard work, good communication is easier. In the sense of not wanting to improve ourselves, becoming a meme is easier but random.
One of the last cases of fast and random popularity we have encountered is the Hawk Tuah Girl.
(In Italy we call them Trash Phenomena: here's an old example)
With a critical eye we can't see anything abnormal: a guy was making a fun video and one clip became popular. Maybe the clip became famous because it was funny, or maybe because we always see girls as people who should be more polite and not talk about sexual stuff (patriarchy stuff, sorry women, our fault), but what we surely know is that this girl became a meme.
Famous and poor, let's become rich
We can see a pattern. People that randomly become famous without a real structure, -often not even with their own platform or on purpose- cannot sustain the notoriety and growing with a personal project or as a company.
In other words, they become famous but not rich.
After that video reached all the screens in the world ( like the gentle-woman we were talking above), you have some untapped potential. After you become famous you want to stay at the top of the wave, so you need to iterate the same process of how to become famous, but every day (it's an iterative function). So she quitted her job and tried to squeeze the lemon to the last drop.
If you have no entrepreneurial skills one of the ways is to become the meme of yourself: take what made you famous and say it to infinity. If you need to pay the bills you can even make some appearances at parties or even make a song or sell some merch. She made, for example, a podcast, trying to make discussable content with even more discussable guests called Talk Tuah. After that, she launched a cryptocurrency that didn’t go so well (for the customers of course).
For those who missed it (lucky you), Hawk Tuah girl, Hailey, went from viral sensation to crypto scandal after launching her $HAWK meme coin in late 2024. The coin soared to a ridiculous $490 million market cap, only to crash down by over 90 percent in mere hours, leaving her viewers—and some with less-than-healthy bank accounts—shocked and pissed off. The backlash was brutal as people complained about losing their life savings. Yes, really. One person even posted about losing a whopping $35,000, and the internet was not kind.
source: The Tab - Hawk Tuah girl breaks silence on whether she’s facing charges after her controversy
If you're a good communicator you can exploit the light out of the spotlight to extract as much visibility as you can and create your own fanbase. One example of good communication and creation of structure was Charlie Kirk. — I don't share his ideology and as an European what happened was crazy for me but, through his communication skills, he reached what he wanted. — He became famous with these provocative videos talking about sensitive stuff debating to people in public. After that, he shaped his own fanbase and used it for his purpose.
For politics, you can change reaching money with people with his own political alignment for the formula to gain power.
My idea is that using illogical and gut-feeling responses helped him to reach celebrity. If you were against him, probably you helped him by commenting or talking (even in a bad way) about him. His purpose was not to say the right stuff but, day after day, to attract as many people aligned with his political view and engage them on his own platform (social networks). If you become a meme it's easier to reach as many people with your alignment as you can. "So popular they can't ignore you" (Sorry Mr. Newport)
Conclusion
Fame without a plan is like a firework: bright, loud… and gone in seconds. Sure, everyone will notice you, but for how long—and at what cost?
Wealth, on the other hand, quietly gives you freedom, choice, and power - the kind that doesn’t depend on likes, shares, or viral moments.
So, the real question isn’t just “rich or famous?” It’s: what do you want your life to be—an endless spotlight, or a life you actually control?
Maybe being rich and unknown isn’t boring at all - it might just be the smartest kind of fame.