I started thinking about this after I went down one of those rabbit holes that begins with listening to Bohemian Rhapsody and ends three hours later with you reading about Freddie Mercury’s personal life at 2 AM like some kind of unhinged biographer. I looked into Elvis, Springsteen, The Beatles, and I kept asking the same question: what is it about these people that made the world lose its mind? Because it wasn’t just the music. There are thousands of incredibly talented musicians nobody remembers.
The thing that separated the rock stars from everyone else was that they genuinely, completely, almost pathologically did not care what anyone thought of them. They said what they felt, wore what they wanted, made the music that was true to them and not the music that would get them approved of, and the world found that so attractive precisely because almost nobody has the guts to live like that. Everyone wants to be free of social approval but almost everyone is terrified of what happens when you stop chasing it, which is why we worship the people who figured it out and put them on stages so we can experience it secondhand for the price of a ticket.
Everyone wants to be free of social approval but almost everyone is terrified of what happens when you stop chasing it.
I wasn’t born with that energy, not even close. I was a painfully shy kid for most of my life, the kind of shy where you rehearse what you’re going to say to the shopkeeper before you get to the counter, and if you think I’m exaggerating I promise you I’m not. Then during COVID I lost about 25 kilos over nine months, which started as a health thing but ended up rewiring my entire personality because when you spend that long rebuilding yourself physically you start asking questions about what else you’ve been carrying that isn’t yours. When I went back to school for my final year I was a completely different person and not in the subtle way people usually mean when they say that, I mean people who had known me for years didn’t recognise the way I spoke or carried myself. I’d stopped caring about academic approval entirely, not because I’d become lazy but because I’d realised I’d been performing for a system that didn’t know me and wasn’t going to remember me, and once you see that clearly you can’t unsee it.
What happened after that was interesting because I started doing well in the things I was genuinely curious about, getting firsts in the modules I cared about at university, and completely ignoring the ones I didn’t, and my grades looked like a heart monitor because of it but I was learning more than I ever had when I was trying to please everyone. The pattern has followed me into work too. The moments where I’ve done my best stuff have never been the moments where I was trying to impress someone, they’ve been the moments where I forgot anyone was watching and just did what felt right, which now that I think about it is exactly what Freddie Mercury was doing except he looked significantly better doing it and I’m in a startup in London not selling out Wembley.
That’s what a rock star is though if you strip it all the way down. It’s not the leather jacket or the guitar or the stadium, it’s someone who got free of the need to be approved of and started living from whatever was true to them, and the rest of us find that magnetic because we know how hard it is to do. Most people never get there because the pull of social approval is so strong that it starts shaping your decisions before you’re even old enough to notice it’s happening, and by the time you do notice you’ve built an entire life around keeping other people comfortable.
The ones who break out of that, whether they’re on a stage or in an office or just being the person at the dinner table who says what everyone else is thinking, those are the rock stars. The music is optional but the freedom really isn’t.
Aryan