Eckhart TolleNYT Bestselling author of the Power of Now

Why Famous People Often Become Unhappy

15 Mar 2026 · 1 min

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In this brief monologue, Eckhart Tolle explains that famous individuals tend to adopt the public’s image of them, creating a false identity. Living through this fictitious sense of self inevitably leads to growing unhappiness. To cope, they further polish and reinforce the image, which he describes as a form of self‑assertion rooted in the constructed identity of ‘me.’ This cycle of image‑maintenance and self‑assertion deepens their dissatisfaction.

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Famous people believe in the image that the world has of them. They live in this totally false identity and believe in that. And then, of course, what usually happens, they become gradually more and more unhappy. Because anybody who lives through a fictitious sense of self, sooner or later, and usually very soon, becomes unhappy. And so you— and then you have to polish the image even more. And that is again a form of self-assertion, self-assertion through the form identity of me.