When you’re famous, you lose all privacy. Psychopaths target you and try to kill you, necessitating security. Your daily life is unavoidably altered. You develop new routines in the paths you take to maintain your sanity.

You can’t even sleep around with your fame-power, because if you’re a movie star, the casting agents (who are female) will fuck you over in punishment for doing something they don’t like. Being a rock star it is more possible, but there is a penalty from society if you are too open about it. Gene Simmons of Kiss could brag of sleeping with thousands of women, but he’s a bad boy performer and that’s expected of him. Slightly harder for romantic rocker Bryan Adams to do so. It would jeopardize his sweet image, if nothing else. Ditto every boy band out there.

Fame gets to your head. You think people are watching you, when they aren’t. Even when you have sunglasses on, you imagine your every move is being shadowed. Michael Jackson used to pretend to go shopping in a mock supermarket for the sensation of normalcy, and this showed how skewed his life had really become.

The fallout from your fame affects your kids. If you’re the President of the United States, your son or daughter will never have a normal life. You’re purchasing your ego satisfaction with their suffering, and you don’t care. Anything you do as President can easily make your child feel bad. When Bill Clinton was doing sexual things with a cigar to someone other than his wife, his daughter Chelsea found out about it and must have been upset with her dad. He had to bear the price of that, simply because he was famous.

People come up to you when you’re famous and want things. One man wanted Arnold Schwarzenegger to say the “I’ll be back” line from The Terminator. No, no! the man said. Not like that! Like you do it in the movies! Every schmuck thinks they can get you to dance for them like a clown. What they don’t get is there’s a million schmucks and only one you and only so much time in which to live.

You’re supposed to be a hero. When Ted Kennedy let his female companion drown, and did nothing to save her, it wrecked his chances at the Presidency permanently. He could be Senator from Massachusetts forever, but there was a glass ceiling lowered like a boom over his head. People resented him.

You’re not supposed to shit or take a piss. Because famous people don’t have bodily functions. If you shit outdoors in a grave emergency situation, you’ll be ostracized one million times more than if a homeless bum does it.

You’re supposed to be great at sex. Mark Wahlberg, when making Boogie Nights, emphasized in interviews that he did not have a massive dick. It was a prosthetic device cleverly made to look like a real penis. Though he emphasized this in interviews, there were 1,000 women watching the movie for every one who saw the interview and the disclaimer. If he had sex with a fan, she would have assumed something about him that would have embarrassed him to be revealed as untrue.

Famous people have invitations to celebrity golf matches and all-star celebrity galas. Michael J. Fox has Parkinson’s Disease and so it makes sense for him to shill for a cure. But otherwise healthy stars have to go to bat for obscure diseases for no other reason than they’re well-known and “owe it to society.”

Your words are always watched and scrutinized. If Brad Pitt said blacks were stupid and inferior, the media would come down on him like a ton of bricks. If a nobody from Missouri, his home state, made the same common declaration, he would be ignored by his neighbors and no news trucks would come up to him to savage his official reputation. Hell, he wouldn’t have an official reputation. He’d be a non-entity.

You’re not allowed to have a political opinion. Stephen King has lost countless right-wing fans because he is always attacking their notions. Michael Jordan could only sell Air Jordan Nike shoes as long as he stayed charmingly blank. If he said he hated whites, he’d eliminate 90% of his buying audience and his endorsement power right there.

Some insecure people hunger after fame. They think it will give a boost to the way they feel about themselves. There is a positive glow to fame and a nice feeling you get when you’re recognized and admired, or when people stop in amazement to ogle you visually, but the costs are tremendous. For most people, it’s simply not worth it.