The price of fame? Mortality risk among famous singers
jech.bmj.com
jech.bmj.com
Whereas my intuition is that there are traits that help you become famous (competitiveness, savant syndrome, prioritization of success over happiness, etc.) that also raise your mortality risk.
The control point is comparing to less famous musicians. I’d assume many of which have similar personality traits and desire for fame. But when it doesn’t materialize, their personality traits arent causing them to die early.
The lifestyle of constantly partying, drugs, sex, little consequences, money, excess, etc. Versus the less famous musician who has to function like an adult, stresses over their mortgage, etc. Is sure to have a variance with respect to mortality.
Goes into a lot of the realities of the surreal lifestyle
If you have personal problems, it will follow you no matter where you go or how much money you have. It’s attached to you.
I don't know how much truth there is to it, some musicians are famous for that, but touring is far from easy, musicians move a lot and have to give their best every time when they are on stage. Especially singers, as their body is their instrument, they can't really afford to be out of shape. I am sure that after big public events like concerts, the thing musicians really want is to get done with it and go to sleep, not party all night. There may be drugs involved, but I'd expect it to be more about enhancing performance than recreation.
And that would apply to all professional musicians, famous or not. For most, I'd say what is excessive is their job, not the life of partying famous people are said to have.
Maybe, although an alternative explanation would be that those musicians with the strongest traits are the ones that succeed, and that same strength of those traits also leads to early mortality.
[1] https://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_dodds_watts06_full....
I don’t know if I buy it myself as being a big contributing factor. The lifestyles of famous people are well known to be indulgent. So that seems like a more direct explanation. But anything is possible
Three main differences that come to mind... - athletes repeat this annually (famous touring musicians might take a year or two off to record new material). - athletes likely live a healthier overall lifestyle because being extremely fit is part of the job. Plus the teams have embedded MDs and other health support staff (some musicians will, some won't). - athletes usually retire from their primary sport in their 30s, so only ~20 years of touring on the high end, where musicians can tour into their 50s or 60s (or beyond for a few).
1) It's in the title: "The Price of Fame" implies that there are downsides to becoming famous, rather than there are downsides to having traits that might make you famous.
2) While the abstract merely claims "associated with" (which is correlation not causation), the phrase "beyond occupational factors" implies that the authors felt they removed important non-causal factors, hinting at likely causal relationship.
And yes, any causality implications are completely unfounded, and so this paper is of low quality.
He was also telling me about how constantly being on tour comes with this unsettling feeling. You travel to a city, play a show, go to sleep, and might wake up in a completely different city, state, or country. He told me that he started to develop some kind of latent anxiety due to the bombardment of new places and experiences causing a lack of consistency and familiarity in which one often anchors their lives to.
The road is littered with smashed guitars.
Also, artists in general are a peculiar profile I think. It's not only famous singers that take drugs, commit suicide etc. One can easily find many writers and painters, some of them even only became famous postmortem.
They acknowledge that fame is potentially confounding: Risk factors (impulsivity, substance use, etc.) -> Fame achievement | Risk factors -> Early mortality
The authors also appear to conclude that fame is semi-causal of the mortality risk. If, taking a causal statistical approach, the authors conditioned on the collider:
Risk factors (substance use, personality traits, mental health vulnerabilities) -> Becoming/staying a professional singer <- Talent/drive toward fame
I do applaud them for preregistering the study, but I think this paper needed a little more rigor in peer review.
Mechanistically, it seems pretty obvious that fame can't cause a physical health outcome. I think the authors know this and they mention that it isn't really fame per se; it's the anxiety caused by public scrutiny and high expectations, often coped with by using illegal drugs to self-medicate.
That isn't a worthless finding, but what are we supposed to take from this? I would imagine drug-using hard-partying rock stars know their lifestyle in unhealthy and dangerous, just as I am fairly certain you'd be able to produce a retrospective study showing wingsuit divers die younger than big wall rock climbers, and big wall rock climbers die younger than trail runners. Anyone doing these things knows the risk and does it anyway. It seems the effect they found is famous musicians die 4.6 years younger on average than comparable unknown musicians. If you told me I could be a rock star but I'd die at 81 instead of 85, I think I'm probably taking that. Of course, we know it doesn't actually work that way, more that a few die in their 20s, far more in their 40s and 50s, and anyone making it past that is probably dying about the same time as anyone else, but whatever the risk is, if that's the life you want, so be it.
The 27 Club is an informal list consisting mostly of popular musicians who died at age 27. Although the claim of a "statistical spike" for the death of musicians at that age has been refuted by scientific research, it remains a common cultural conception that the phenomenon exists, with many celebrities who die at 27 noted for their high-risk lifestyles.I prefer this sort of story to a scientific study!
And the people who make it a long time have probably learned how to push back against agents pushing them to work too much.
I keep thinking about Willie Nelson.
Keith Richards and Steven Tyler would like a word. :)
(aside, and with good humor: it's interesting that all but one of the dead folks names are misspelled, and it's the least famous of the lot! :)
In other words something like compare the life expectancy of people who don't play the lottery vs. people who win and then add in people who play as much as the winners but never win.
> Methods We used a retrospective matched case–control design in a preregistered study to compare famous singers with matched less famous singers (total N=648) based on the matching criteria of gender, nationality, ethnicity, genre and solo/band status. We compared mortality risk using a Kaplan-Meier curve and used a Cox regression to test the effect of fame.