Is Fame a disease? Attention, Awareness, and the Pathology of Being the ‘Object’

Is Fame a disease? Attention, Awareness, and the Pathology of Being the ‘Object’

Humans are self-aware, but what is their awareness oriented toward?

People experience awareness as directed outward, toward the world itself. Think of what you are doing now – reading something. Their attention rests on environments, ideas, systems, problems, and other people as agents ‘in their own right’. They observe, interpret, and engage. Their awareness is about something external in most people most of the time. Meaning arises from interaction with reality, not from being perceived within it.

Others experience awareness as focusing on receiving the attention of others — specifically. In this orientation, the object of awareness is not the self, but the belief that one is being watched. Awareness is therefore not self-focused as in a meditative and reflective self-awareness state; it is attention focused on attention – of others. The individual is monitoring their observers rather than engaging with external reality.

This difference might be subtle, but the distinction is critical. I am not differentiating humility and narcissism, nor self-reflection and egotism. I am referring to  the difference between awareness of the world, a physiological evolutionary need, lets call it truth, and awareness of being watched – the value one believes they have attained in the eyes of others – lets call that ‘lie’, a word we used to use a lot before we started qualifying correct as being ‘political’.

In the second orientation, the individual’s internal reference point is not “What is happening?” but “How am I being seen?” Experience is filtered through an implicit assumption of heightened visibility. Importantly, this does not require actual observation. The belief that one is the centre of others’ attention is sufficient to structure perception, emotion, and behaviour. Psychiatry recognises related phenomena, most notably delusions of reference, in which neutral events are interpreted as personally significant, a feature of psychosis. However, pathology is not defined by the presence of such beliefs alone, but by their effects on global health, functional capacity, relationships, and adaptive regulation.

Most humans actively dislike being the centre of attention. Many young people drink or use other substances to overcome this ‘shyness’. This alone is revealing. Sustained attention directed toward the self is not intrinsically rewarding or adaptive. The belief that others are watching is therefore not a neutral perceptual stance; it is an inference, and often a false one.

This belief must also be distinguished from relational significance. Being important to a parent, a partner, or a small group is normal, bounded, and reciprocal. What is at issue here is different: the sense that one occupies a generalised attentional centre — that one’s existence, opinions, or emotional states warrant disproportionate notice by others at large. Reciprocity, and the lack of it, is defining.

From an evolutionary perspective, outward-directed awareness is foundational. In small, biologically scaled human groups, survival depends on monitoring the environment, reading others accurately, and responding to shared threats and opportunities. Awareness directed outward reinforces cooperation, learning, and collective regulation. In such settings, being the object of attention is rare, situational, uncomfortable and temporary — leadership, danger, ritual — and quickly relinquished.

Persistent awareness of being watched would have been maladaptive. A group member who continually assumed attentional centrality would disrupt cohesion and invite correction. Attention toward individuals was episodic, not identity-forming.

A problem emerges when social scale exceeds biological design.

As societies expanded, attention could be aggregated, prolonged, and concentrated. Structures of hierarchy allowed attention to be held by individuals not temporarily, but continuously. This shift altered the relationship between awareness and identity. The familiar aphorism that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely may be mis-specified. In psychological terms, it is attention that corrupts — and absolute attention that corrupts absolutely. Sustained visibility reshapes self-perception, not through malice or intent, but through repeated reinforcement of perceived centrality. It makes one feel special – a little too special.

Technology accelerated this process by enabling the classification, amplification, and persistence of individual visibility far beyond its original social function. Modern platforms do not merely allow communication; they manufacture ambient attention — signals of reach, reaction, and relevance detached from direct human relationship. What is amplified is not contribution or competence, but salience. The individual becomes indexed, broadcast, and symbolically present in the lives of others without reciprocal contact or value.

I propose a pathological state: ‘Famosis’ — a chronic condition characterised by a sustained sense of being the object of others’ attention. When onset is sudden — through rapid visibility, status elevation, or viral internet exposure — the acute form may just as easily be termed ‘Famitis’.

The core feature of Famosis is not arrogance, but attentional inversion. Awareness becomes consistently oriented toward the attention of perceived observers. Individuals begin to experience themselves less as agents in the world and more as objects within it. This alters emotional regulation and behaviour in predictable ways. Opinions acquire disproportionate weight. Criticism becomes destabilising. Indifference is experienced as loss rather than neutrality.

Secondary behaviours often follow. Novelty-seeking, escapism, substance use, infidelity, and compulsive self-display function not as moral failings, but as attempts to sustain the internal sense of attentional centrality. When attention wanes, identity destabilises.

This proposed pathology state could quite easily be studies based on outcomes. Does Famosis lead to long, stable & productive lives?

It is likely that neuro-endocrine systems governing reward, status, and social salience reinforce this pattern, though the precise mechanisms are less important than the direction of causality. Attention that should move outward becomes trapped in a loop of perceived observation.

At its extreme, Famosis resembles many other culturally induced pathologies — the consequence of attention systems operating at scales and intensities far beyond those for which the human nervous system evolved. Persistent visibility, in this sense, is not inherently empowering, as many would now lead us to believe. It is biological mismatch – and like all these mismatches, the cause of so much suffering in the modern world.