No Stupid Questions

Shit man, I dealt with anxiety and depression for maybe ten years doing mostly hospice/end of life care. Acting is a difficult profession (seriously, it is) in a lot of ways, but it's mostly controlled. They have schedules, and the actors rarely have to deal with the crises of making the shoot happen (except the ones silly enough to try and direct or produce lol).

Any job can be done with moderately controlled anxiety. The only question is how long, at what price?

Since those folks get paid way better than I did wiping asses and moving bodies, I suspect they can call their therapist or whoever during a major anxiety event, and can afford the usual meds to help ease them along.

Musicians are similar, once they're big enough to do big tours. They have managers and assistants to help with the most stressful things outside of the performance itself. So they only have to worry about part of it.

Besides, I dunno if you've ever tried and performance of any sort, but it's a different kind of fear. Yeah, stage fright exists, and everyone stresses about doing well, but people that pursue it as a job get a bigger internal reward out of it than a filthy casual would. So the payoff of the stress is higher. Like, for me, I'd never be able to do theater with any regularity because I don't get that joy from it. But someone that's top tier and doing it for a living definitely get a big dump of dopamine and other neurotransmitters from it. People think I'm fucking crazy for some of the martial arts shit I used to do, but it fulfilled me, so the price was worth it. Same thing for them

If every moment of your life was watched and critiqued by someone for the slightest thing they can get a click or a view for, would you not also start having mental health problems.

Your entire premise assumes that they have anxiety before becoming famous. People’s lives change and so do their conditions.

Do you really believe a hunch of anxious people one day decided to become famous to increase triggering their anxiety?

People become entertainers for a myriad of reasons. Some do it for attention, of course. Others so they can pretend to be someone else. It's a form of escapism to get away frm the anxiety of life. When fame comes along, they can no longer hide behind the chatacter, and the attention bleeds into their personal life, ratcheting up the anxiety. Similarly, many comedians tell jokes to hide pain. The pain is still there, just hidden. For actors like this, the anxiety is still there and the constant attention makes it worse.

The lack of empathy in celebrity culture is the real problem. The fact that entertainers are real people with real lives gets lost in the noise. When Emma Stone is off screen, and not promoting something, she should be able to go out to eat without being followed, questioned, or harasssed. She can't, because as a society, we've choosen to treat her as something different than a person. She's treat as a celebrity, somehow making it ok for her to be hounded everywhere. It's no wonder many of them have anxiety.

Imagine not getting to live your life because of your job. Imagine people following you around to the store, a concert, or cornering you in a bathroom because of what you do for a living. It's a failing of society that lets this occur, a general lack of empathy towards celebrity, not a failing on that person's career choice.

Bravery is not about not having fear, its doing it anyway fear or not.

Lots of people have anxiety and still do stressful things. Many forms of it can be treated, or at least managed, and some people are just determined enough that they refuse to let it stop them.

You could look at it as they have an alter ego (the character) to stand up and not be that person, that worrier. A form of therapy by dissociation possibly.

Because it's not good to give in to your anxiety and let it keep you from getting what you want in life.