Hi. I'm Xeno, and I've dropped a lot of names. It is lame. It's all over my posts for years, even on my old site. I'm fascinated by fame. It started when I found out as a boy that my uncle was part of a world famous rock group. Then I got into the Beatles and saw that these famous guys were really loved. They were famous and they were loved ... some kind of super love... more loved than I'd ever seen anyone loved. Girls would chase them and scream! In my growing brain, fame became love. Around this time my mother and father split up. My father was a musician who was trying to be famous. I guess my kid brain thought that my parents split up because my dad wasn't getting famous. Partly true due to money issues. More reinforcement that fame = love, unfame = rejection.
L
ater when I told people about my famous rock star relative, it opened a few doors for me as a musician. I think so anyway. Perhaps we got in based on real talent or charm, but I always suspected that once you have a "foot in the door" with knowing one famous person, other famous people will know you. From there, you can get addicted. Intermittent reinforcement makes a behavior last even longer.One of my closest friends had the same problem and we would sort of feed off of each other. We wanted to know famous people, to be in the "in" crowd. We knew the top musicians in the town. We got passed in free to sold-out shows when other people had to stand in line. We high-fived each other for having "connections". We played shows in places the famous people played. We, ourselves, paid special attention to people who knew famous
people. 
We saw the same thing with other people wanting to be around us. When you do get well known, it sucks that you can't tell if people like you for yourself, or because of your fame score. We had groupies. We had a few stalkers. But it was all a rush.Looking in the proverbial mirror tonight, I am facing my idol worship. I see foundations of motivations for everything I have done, music, my career, this blog ... so much is based on a what must be an incomplete equation: I don't really believe that fame is love. Fame is fame. Love is love.
I've had some awareness of my fame seeking psychosis for years. I stopped playing music live because it felt too ego-driven... (We are often like pendulums. We notice a problem, then swing too far in the other direction.) ... but I remain ego driven... it seems deeply built in.
Example: By posting a few things interesting each day on a blog for years, I've built up "a following" of web readers. The fact that I've reached over 1.5 million page views gives me a sense of purpose. Sure, I love helping people and entertaining people, but there is also some motivation for this blog that is prideful.I'm visualizing dropping out of everything and walking on a beach as a happy unknown bum for the rest of my life. (Again the pendulum swings.)
What is the healthy balance? Who of you has confronted the name dropping demon and won? Who has fixed a flawed fame fantasy?
3 comments:
You worry too much. Enjoy the world you live in. Unless you are going out of your way to setup "conversational situations" in order to "drop a name". (terrible sentance)
I dropped your name the other day when someone asked me how I knew about the Google scam.
Xenocentrism has recently been used in social philosophy to describe a particular ethical disposition. Ethnocentrism, as coined by Professor William Graham Sumner of Yale University, describes the natural tendencies of an individual to place disproportionate worth upon the values and beliefs of one's own culture relative to others. Expanding upon this idea, John D. Fullmer of Brigham Young University offered that Xenocentrism results from an attempt on the part on an individual to correct his or her own ethnocentrism. He argued that as an individual reacts to his own perceived ethnocentrism, he or she will often overcompensate and instead begin to place undue consideration upon the ideas and needs of social groups that are far removed.
-wikipedia
I love your blog and read it everyday. I have recommended it to family and friends. I don't know much about you, but I have noticed through reading that you know a lot of people. I felt this was a good thing because I feel like everyone should read your blog, and explaining to them that the person writing it has some connections and isn't just some random guy who decided to write about stuff maybe makes them more likely to check it out.
One thing that may be a problem with getting more people to read it (not that there aren't enough already), is that on first impression this site looks to be another conspiracy theory site, therefore making the information on it invalid in their heads. That is how I was led here in the first place, was looking up some stuff about some conspiracy theory. I know after reading it that this isn't the case at all, but perhaps that turns some people off to it. Who knows, but I love it and hopefully this great source of news never goes away.
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