What the Complaints About How Hard it is to be Famous are Really About

It is a commonplace that the famous complain (ceaselessly) about the downsides to being famous. How complete strangers may be inappropriately familiar with them because they deludedly think they know them, even though they don't. How googling themselves they will find people saying nasty things. And so on and so forth.

The complainants often being unintelligent, inarticulate, unreflective, they tend not to explain themselves very well. The complainant isn't complaining about fame, really. What discomfits them is fame on very particular terms. What they really complain about is being famous enough for others to know them, but not having enough power to not have to care what those others think, so that they suffer a measure of exposure for a measure of privilege, but do not feel really and truly secure and protected and comfortable.

To cite an easy Hollywood example, studio heads are famous--in cases, famous enough to have their doings well-reported in the press, their faces known (and even get badmouthed a great deal online as they outrage fandom again and again and again and again and again and again as they crassly, grubbily, exploit franchises of which they know and understand absolutely nothing). But one doesn't often see them complain about "being famous." It's the actors who complain--because they are more visible, and less protected, than the Suits in the executive suites, a lot less sufficing to destroy their careers than the Chief Executive Officers whose principal "skill set" is losing their companies' money, then claiming nine figure compensation packages for having done their shareholders the favor.