Our Obsession With Celebrity & Success

August 31, 2011

Interview with James Rubens, author of the book OverSuccess: Healing the American Obsession With Wealth, Fame, Power, and Perfection

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Mike Carruthers:
More than ever in our history, we are fascinated with achievement, celebrity, wealth and success.

James Rubens:
And so instead of trying to keep up with the Joneses (which are our neighbors) we're trying and failing to keep up with Brangelina and other such persons... or Bill Gates.
 

James Rubens, author of the book OverSuccess, says this is due in part because we see these things in the media all the time.

The typical American adult spends about nine hours a day (more than any other waking activity) consuming some type of media. And what's happening is our psychologies are becoming saturated with really quite vivid images of the world's most brilliant and beautiful people and their possessions.

Consequently, as a society we spend an awful lot of time chasing fame, fortune and status with some often unattractive consequences.

One in three (the survey I found a couple of months ago) Midwest middle schoolers are now bullied because they wear the wrong clothing labels. If you look at our friendships, one in four of us tell us that we have no close friends. And this is double the rate of friendlessness of 1985.

There's nothing wrong with success and achievement but success at any cost and success at the expense of so many other things seems to be more common and more problematic.

We've seen (this is IRS data) that tax cheating has tripled since 1990. Ninety percent of job seekers now falsify their resumes. So what's happened as a result of these pressures - we have become unbalanced.