Never mind the Kardashians, these are the real superstars

The Age

23-05-2025

She's walking down Brunswick Street in Fitzroy, not especially dressy, not tattooed or pierced or lavishly blinged. But she's striding out with a mission and feeling pretty good about herself, you can tell. People recognise her and waves of her cachet rock them like buoys as she passes, and they stop and glance back at her and ask their friends: 'Wow, do you guys know who that is?' Then they begin to argue about whether they should run after her and ask for selfies. Or would that be too uncool?
Is she a rock star or a rapper? A Swiftian (apologies, Dean) songstress? The scene-stealer in Netflix's latest hit? A winner of Survivor, The Voice or Alone? A novelist banal enough to have broken through into the public consciousness? An influencer monetising a massive online titillation?
No. She has spent the past 10 years of her life successfully negotiating with the Malian government and Shell to have lead removed from petrol in that country, thereby saving many, many thousands of lives, essentially doing the work of hundreds of doctors. In the world I'm inventing here, a world where doing good is fame-worthy, she is a superstar.
From Fitzroy we fly south across the town, with a bird's-eye view all the way, and descend on the MCG where, sitting in the packed crowd at the footy we see a young, bearded guy in an open collar and a standoff with a scalding dim sim. He's holding the morsel in front of his face, alternately blowing on it to cool it down and snarling at it like a wolf at a wounded elk.
A cameraman with an eye for celebrity notices him and zooms in and the broadcaster puts him up on the big screen. The crowd inhales, awestruck, pointing out this epiphany to each other. The young man sprung tussling with his overheated morsel chuckles and waves at the camera, causing the crowd to break into such a tumult of adulation that even the players pause. Some greater attraction than the game is unfolding here, some rarer treat than sport. The players look to the screen and see the young dim sim fan and begin clapping along with the crowd. It's him. Wow. He's here. We are in the presence of greatness. Of someone … great.
Who is the young man the stadium is cheering? A VC winner? Some nascent Aussie Springsteen? Some algorithmic maestro who's magicked a start-up into billions? A Hemsworth on a gap year? Soldier? Musician? Actor? Tech tycoon? Who could be adored to this extent?
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He's a guy who has spent his brief adulthood successfully lobbying billionaires to divert their philanthropy away from look-at-me donations to overfunded galleries to the development of a vaccine for malaria, a breakthrough that will save well over half a million lives a year. In this lovely world I'm momentarily imagining, his commitment to goodness through effective philanthropy has made him cooler than Snoop Dogg.
Out in the real world, our world, the one you're sitting in, there are people doing this work – and receiving no recognition for their life-altering achievements. So how do you make doing good a high-status activity, and thus a more common calling? Why isn't goodness as cool as rap? Why are its prodigies unknown? Why do we bestow accolades on Kardashians rather than angels?