hungry ghosts

mike white on hollywood and success:

Do you consider yourself successful?
I feel successful. If you told me when I was younger that I would be able to keep doing this and I’m still in it, I would be stoked. I feel successful because I’m going to have a lot of movies come out this year. Whether I’m proud of everything, I don’t know, but I’m still in it. It wasn’t obvious to me when I started out that I was going to be able to have a career, so with that, I feel successful.

But then when you get into the nitty-gritty of it, you go, “Oh, it would be nice to have an Oscar, or huge box office.” It’s nice to have everything, you want it all, and then you get caught up in these external markers of what success is and start feeling sort of empty or deflated. I resist it but I still can get caught up in that, and I think that’s what Brad’s Status is about. It’s a sucker’s game. I’ve seen it in Hollywood: People who are at the top levels are still chasing something. It’s a drug, and you get the drug and then the drug fades and you need it again. You see a lot of hungry ghosts who have these great careers and tons of money and all of this admiration and then you get close to it and it’s like, “Wow, this person is so much more miserable than you would expect.”