Many celebrities suffered from depression: Jim Carrey, Dwayne Johnson, Brad Pitt, Ryan Reynolds Demar Derozen, Kate Spade, James Franco, Michael Phelps, Robin Williams and more. Some suicided.
People usually don’t get it. They are successful, they are rich and they have hundreds of thousands of fans. People love them, why?
The book “Why does E=mc2” has the answer. Science does have the answer: there is nothing absolute, this world is all about relativity. Time, speed, and everything. It’s just our sense is so limited that we wrongly believe an absolute situation exists. It doesn’t.
In terms of depression, it doesn’t really matter how rich or poor you are. It matters more on the relativity, the gap I talked about before is all about relativity: expectation vs. reality. For celebrities, their self-expectations are usually higher than regular people, so when they have a gap, it’s usually bigger and harder to deal with. That’s why probably they’re more susceptible to depression than others.
Advice to all: don’t be fooled by any absolute metrics. How much do you earn? How big is the title? How many fans do you have? It doesn’t really matter. What matters is comparing to your start line, how far have you progressed.
Recently I read an online story about Ling Sun, a girl who was bored in a very rural and poor village in Hunan, China. She quit studying right after middle school because most people around her didn’t value much about education. She went to Shenzhen and became a worker on an assembly line. Different from hundreds of thousands of assembly line workers, she was not satisfied and made a series of hard decisions to continue learning English, Programming, and other skills. Years later, now she is working at Google New York office as a programmer. If we care more about her absolute situation, she is not that successful, just another programmer in a company with so many talents. However, what she learned from her journey made her a wisdom person. Her stories inspired more people to not lose hope and keep pushing their limits and break the boundaries others put around them. Her saying is not very different from many sayings from genius people like Steve Job’s famous “Stay foolish, stay hungry”.
By the end of the day, what matters is how much you have advanced in your journey, but not which position you are on your journey. Relativity to others doesn’t matter at all – some were born richer, but if they don’t grow from there, they fail the test and miss the opportunity. Everybody, rich or poor, was given equal opportunity, but if people focus on the absolute position and ask for absolute equality, they totally miss the point.