Imaginary

Certain colours – magenta, for example – are not real in the physical sense. That is, there is no magenta wavelength. In fact, everything on the colour wheel between red and violet, which is all of the purples, only exists in our heads. There's every reason to think that if aliens appeared and we showed them purple, they would say "that's just red and blue!" and laugh at us.

Purple exists because we have our own mental colour system, which is an imperfect mapping of the physical colour system. And this doesn't just mean that we see colours wrong sometimes, or that there are certain colours we can't see, but that there are also colours we can see that never existed at all: imaginary colours. But all of our mappings have this same property; there are certain characteristic edge cases that can lead to imaginary results.

There are a lot of theories for why celebrities often seem to suffer from depression, addiction and public meltdowns. One possibly too easy answer is that we would all act out if we could, but regular people don't have the resources. I'd like to suggest an alternative: empathy. When we see people doing things, we use our empathic system to recreate that feeling in our own minds. But much like colour vision, empathy imperfectly maps the external to the internal.

We sometimes misinterpret feelings, and sometimes feel nothing in a situation where we should have empathy. Is it possible there could be certain imaginary feelings that do not exist except when we feel them second-hand in someone else? I believe so, and I believe one such feeling is fame, or success. The feeling of "now I've made it; I'm here; I did it; I'm great now". We feel this feeling in others, but I don't believe we feel it in ourselves.

So what could be more destabilising than being driven by fame? You see celebrities and successful people and long to feel like they feel. But, of course, you don't know how they feel. And some day, by luck or hard work, you end up like them – and the feeling's not there. What do you do next? Where do you turn if the thing you've been looking for turns out to be an illusion?