Urban Dictionary defines a campus celebrity as “someone at your school who you develop a fascination with despite knowing nothing about them because they are attractive, weird-looking or just seem like they lead an interesting life.”

I’ll admit, there’s something entertaining about the concept of a campus celebrity. Everyone has that one person on campus who feels like a recurring character in their life. You don’t know them, but you’ve seen them around enough that they start to stand out.

Maybe it’s the way they dress. Maybe they’re always at the same place at the same time as you. Maybe their social media caught your eye. Maybe you’ve even heard a little bit of lore about them that makes you want to know more. Whatever it is, spotting them on campus gives you something dumb to look forward to in the middle of your average Monday. 

However, the term celebrity feels like an exaggeration. Real celebrities have careers, platforms or at least some reason to be in the public eye. And if you really think of them as a celebrity, that would make you a fan. But it’s important to consider, campus celebrities are pretty much blank slates. We fill in the gaps about them with our own assumptions, deciding they must be cooler, more confident and living a life that’s somehow more interesting than ours. But when you stop and think about it, it’s kind of crazy. It creates this whole idea about a person you don’t actually know, and somehow their presence feels bigger than it probably is.

It puts people on a pedestal — the idea that someone is automatically above us simply because we’ve built an image of them in our heads. The second you label someone as a campus celebrity, you’ve already separated them from yourself. They’re special, you’re ordinary. Once we put someone on a pedestal, comparison becomes almost unavoidable. We start measuring our own lives against this imagined version of theirs, assuming they’re more successful or living a more exciting story. The irony is that most of this “life” exists only in our imagination based on snippets of social media, gossip or passing glances. We’ve constructed the narrative ourselves, and suddenly we want that or want to be that. 

Sometimes you actually meet them. That’s when it hits you that the image you had built doesn’t always line up with the reality of who they are. Maybe they’re not nearly as interesting as the character you created in your head. It can be disappointing, almost embarrassing, realizing you’ve been looking up and admiring someone only to learn you were really just looking up to your own idea of them.

This is especially true when it comes to catching feelings. The second someone starts to seem interesting, our brains start constructing a whole version of them. Based on what little we know or notice, we set them against an invisible standard in our heads, expecting them to measure up to the fantasy we’ve built. It’s common to defend someone to friends or act like we know them deeply, when really we’re just holding onto the version we created. It’s not until we actually get close that the real person sometimes fails to meet the expectations — proving that, yes, friends were right all along. (Been there, done that.)

What we’re really doing half the time is just projecting. We take the little things like someone’s outfit, the way they laugh, a snarky comment they made — and we construct those scraps into a whole personality. But if you step back, you realize most of that is just us filling in the blanks with what we want to see.

Usually, it says more about us than it does about them. If you’re convinced someone’s life is more exciting, maybe that’s just because you’re bored with your own routine. If you decide someone must be the most confident person alive, maybe that’s the exact thing you wish you had more of. It’s like we’re using them as a canvas for our own insecurities. 

The funny part is, while you’re busy imagining how flawless someone else’s life must be, someone else might be doing the exact same thing to you. You might be their campus celebrity — the person they always notice walking into class, the one they assume has the perfect group of friends or the one they swear always looks put together (even if you rolled out of bed ten minutes ago). Projection works both ways, even if we don’t always realize it.

That’s the bigger takeaway: it’s great to admire people, even entertaining to have a campus celebrity in your head, but not if it makes you shrink in comparison. The perfect life you think they’re living probably doesn’t exist, at least not in the way you’ve built it up. So don’t sell yourself short. Your everyday, the stuff you barely think about, could be the exact thing that makes someone else stop and notice you.

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