Maybe the longing for fame and success feels closest to the ache you feel right before you yawn. The tightness in your chest and the lump in your throat because the oxygen just dropped to a record low, when tears well in your eyes, and anger pulses through your fists.
Why do humans feel this way?
I just read an article about a girl who got an acceptance letter from four Ivy League schools just because of the essay she included in her application.
Before that, I watched Andy Bernard, for the second time, fail at his hunt for fame in The Office.
Before that, I read about how hard it is for screenplays to be read, or even chosen for a film. When they are, original writers fight for screen credits because Hollywood stars rewrite the film with an extra semicolon, or another dot, and then steal the fame.
And before reading that, I watched a TED Talk about how it's almost impossible for anyone to even have the slightest chance of becoming as successful as Steve Jobs.
When everything around us is either extreme failure or complete success, I don't know how we don't die more from that rage-and-oxygen depletion feeling more than we already do.
Why do people sometimes kill to be famous, and everyone else would rather die rich than live a poor man?
Sometimes, I feel so unexplainably jealous when someone "makes it."
Which is nonsensical.
There are so many wonderful things that have happened in my life. There's no reason in the world why I should feel angry when other good things happen in anyone else's.
What's scariest about this hunger is that in the fight for success there's a tendency to lose what once mattered most.
Just think of King David. He entered the Scriptures as an overlooked son, a tender of the sheep. And before he became King of Israel, his sole focus was on glorifying the Lord. Yet he got caught up in it all. He saw Bathsheba and he longed for her. He became a murderer to cover up his sin of raping her. If the righteous King David could lose sight of right and wrong so quickly that he became a rapist and killer because of greed, how easy it must be to become corrupted.
Mia, in La La Land. Lame example, but she forgot what meant the most to her in her chase for success.
It's a fatal feeling, this desire.
Most of us have it.
But it's wrong.
If we measure success by popularity, then what's it even worth?
Side note, does anyone really like the popular kid?
Instead of chasing for meaningless attention, seek God and stay on the path that matters most.
Without depth and purpose that feeling of gasping for air will never go away. Instead, we'll all become airless skulls of desire, inhaling deeply when we fake a laugh.
