The first time someone spoke to me about the life of fame was in a literature class in my second year of high school. We read the Coplas a la muerte de su padre by Jorge Manrique, which in couplet XXXV says:
—Do not let the fearful, bitter battle
that you await become so harsh,
for another long life
of such glorious fame
that you leave behind here:
although this life of honor
is not eternal
nor true,
yet, all things considered, it is much better
than the other, temporal,
perishable.
“Fame is absurd, it makes no sense,” declared our professor, José Ignacio Yebra, at that moment. For, as he explained that day, the years will blur us in the memories of the living until, across the passage of generations, every trace of us disappears. After Manrique, with the scythe of death already cleaving into adolescent awareness, Yebra then quoted Ecclesiastes and those words of the Hebrew preacher, Qohelet, the breath that is life: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” It impacted me so much that, for the first time, without any exhortation from priests or catechists, I took up the Bible and read those devastating passages about existential fugacity.
The life of fame is an ancient human aspiration, though it has always been understood in different ways across eras. Our times are no exception. In Antiquity, achieving glory meant performing deeds worthy of being remembered: triumphing in battle, ruling, creating a work that would endure. That fame was a way to defy death, to survive and prolong one’s existence in the collective memory. It was not simply about being known, but about deserving to be remembered.
In More Famous Than Jesus (Debate, 2026), Edu Galán examines how fame has shifted from being tied to heroic deeds, reputation, or transcendence to becoming an industry that manufactures celebrities, commercializes their privacy, and turns public attention into a commodity. Galán, in fact, undertakes a parallel journey through the history of technology, with a distinctly Western bias acknowledged at the outset. He traverses the tale through Roman roads, currency, the printing press, steam presses, cinema, television, and finally the internet. Today, with digitalization and mass media as cogs of the system, and unlike classical glory, Galán describes how celebrity can arrive with the virality of a video just a few seconds long and remain, or evaporate within days.
More Famous Than Jesus is a necessary, agile, and sharp essay that invites us to distance ourselves from the everyday obsession with fame transmuted into a consumer object. Edu Galán does not shy away from any topic in general, and he undertakes the challenge of addressing the metatema of fame by following a historical thread. He weaves together central aspects of human psychology, such as the concept of glamour or charisma, with strands of sociology, like the rise of the phenomenon of fans, the price of fame, countercultures, or feminism, among other topics. It is a complete, reference-worthy essay, unmatched in Spanish, where it questions and confronts other earlier approaches. And it does so from within the system, from his experiences in the media and, I would dare to say, also from home life.
In a society where the promised eternal life of religion has been ridiculed, when people squander their own time by immersing themselves in the stories manufactured around others, Galán offers a critical framework, contextualizes it, and explains it. He astounds with the eclectic breadth of his references. Expanding on one of the cases he presents, perhaps the difference between Alexander the Great and a social media star is not so much the shared desire to endure as the technological mechanism that promises to satisfy that craving, and its associated temporality. Transformed into symbolic capital, if previously one aspired to survive in the ethereal memory of future generations, now it seems enough merely not to lose followers, not to disappear in the next viral TikTok video, or in the Sisyphean cycle of the news and the scroll. Seen from the outside, Galán respects the fan but, between the lines, satirizes the useless wear of their lives, the hours squandered before the black screen. Black Mirror.
Galán, although he treats it, glides lightly over the narrative dimension. Contemporary fame repeats the universal arguments of classical theater, repurposed in cinema from its origins: rises and falls, heroes and villains, rivalries, redemptions, betrayals, tumultuous or extraordinary lives, or existential journeys that are simply exposed to public voracity, when the reality show (or its natural evolution, the talent show) prices privacy. In this sense, Galán provides examples and astutely recovers La semilla inmortal (Anagrama, 2006) by Jordi Balló and Xavier Pérez, in which the authors delve more thoroughly into how film reworks ancient narrative structures and universal myths. La semilla inmortal explains why the stories of the famous captivate us: we recognize in them fundamental plots that culture has been unraveling for centuries, perhaps since those clans of hominids entertained their experiences around a campfire. Because gossip has a non-negligible evolutionary origin. As social beings, we continue seeking the same thing: that our existence means something to someone.
Since the early days of the internet, in the nineteen-nineties, aware of my own irrelevance in the whirring of the web, of how dilution in the search engine increases with the probability of a given name and the frequency of cognomens, I tried to find myself there for years, unsuccessfully. I invented other nicknames, other profiles, while I wandered through the digital universe. I had forgotten Qohelet until, a few months ago, the professor Yebra left us—someone who was never famous, nor did he want to be. You will have a hard time finding traces of him on the internet or elsewhere. Vanity of vanities. And I recalled his final plea in that high school class: “Fame, fame! Woe to the unseen! What will become of the world if we never notice them!”
Shouldn’t we, in this twisted universe of fames, seek more cronopios?
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Author: Edu Galán. Title: More Famous Than Jesus. Publisher: Debate. Where to buy: All of your books.