[Barrin92]

> “If everybody else is doing better than you, it is hard to be satisfied with your life conditions, no matter how good they objectively are,” he wrote. “By not displaying, let alone exaggerating, their own happiness, Finns might help each other to make more realistic comparisons, which benefits everybody’s happiness.”

Robert Sapolsky has dedicated a large chunk of his career to study the biological underpinnings for this and has written a great deal on it. His research shows that if you compare health outcomes in countries, accounting for all differences in access and care, relative inequality itself causes significant bodily harm as important as material inequality. The induced stress in a population from the hamster wheel mentality literally changes peoples brains.

It's not surprising that actors and actresses even if successful suffer the same fate because they live in a sort of cauldron where that competitiveness and status seeking is dialed up to 11. The drug use, marriage disasters, meltdowns and constant rehab visits that a non-trivial amount of them go through make a lot of sense in that context.

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ZrqCFa...

[hinkley]

There's a perverse incentive for agents and producers because they typically only make money if the artist makes money, so anything you do to encourage that drive to make new projects nets you more money. If your victim blows all their money on drugs or parties or buying ridiculous things, then they are highly motivated to get back to work.

[cs137]

I don't think that's the issue with agents and producers. It's more complicated than that.

It's probably different in Hollywood in publishing, but the reasons agents are such a weak link in traditional publishing (to the point of nearly ruining the industry) are: (1) inaccessibility (you can't actually query agents who have any pull; you have to know someone even to get read), and (2) locus of power. To be more specific on the latter, the agent knows that connections inside the industry are her power base, whereas authors are basically interchangeable--from a humanistic standpoint, I don't agree; but commercially speaking, it's the case--so she has every incentive to put the publisher's interests ahead of those of her authors, even though her job is the opposite.

Hollywood is probably a bit different because movie stars have a lot more leverage than midlist authors. So, it may be that there's the opposite problem. Literary agents often push authors to lower their expectations and take crappy deals; a Hollywood agent's probably more inclined to push the client toward aggressive decisions while the iron is hot, so to speak.

[prometheus76]

This is also the foundation behind Mimetic Theory developed by Rene Girard.