Time Is Going to Fix That Getting-To-Be-Famous Thing

More about Time Is Going to Fix That Getting-To-Be-Famous Thing

In the future, fame becomes less a destination and more a flicker—brief, volatile, and shaped by forces no one fully controls. Ambition will still burn, but the landscape it moves through is unstable, shifting beneath every step. Time, meanwhile, remains the one force that doesn’t negotiate. It waits, watches, and ultimately reveals how little of our frantic reaching actually survives. The truth isn’t cruel; it’s clarifying. The rush toward recognition is temporary. The work itself is what remains.

Fame, once thought of as a kind of immortality, has become one of the most short-lived currencies ever invented. Algorithms slice attention into seconds, and people chase visibility the way prospectors chased gold—desperately, knowing the boom could end by nightfall. Viral moments flash, burn out, and fall into the same oblivion that swallowed yesterday’s icons. The crowd has become restless and unsentimental, discarding heroes the moment a newer distraction appears.

Money mirrors this same instability. Economic fortunes fluctuate like weather systems, shaped by volatile markets and technologies that outpace human adaptability. Wealth appears suddenly and evaporates just as fast. The future economy rewards disruption, not longevity; spectacle, not craft. Even those who achieve financial success will feel the ground shaking beneath them, knowing their relevance is conditional and their security temporary.

Time, on the other hand, has no interest in hype cycles. It strips away illusions, reducing fame and money to the transient roles they truly are. What looks monumental in the heat of the moment becomes small when viewed across years. The artist working quietly while the skeleton raises a club behind him illustrates this perfectly: the world can chase glory, but time always has the final revision.

And in that final revision, what matters is not the glare of recognition but the substance of what was made, lived, or offered. Time fixes ambition by shrinking it back to human scale, leaving behind the part that was real. In a future obsessed with attention, the only enduring fame may come from work done without the expectation of permanence—work grounded in the strange, honest fact of mortality, rather than the unstable currency of being seen.