I watched a documentary 15 years ago in which a reporter asked a group of kids what they wanted to be when they grew up.

The answer surprised me: “I want to be famous.”

Don’t recall the interviewer’s exact follow-up, but I think it was: “And what do you want to be famous for?” If it wasn’t, it should have been — none of them seemed to have an answer other than the aforementioned, egg-bald, “I want to be famous.”

I have never understood it, this lust for fame. And the more I learn of its final effect on many of those who achieve it, the more baffled I get.

Malcolm Muggeridge may have been the first to use the phrase in his book “Muggeridge Through The Microphone” (1967) in which he wrote:

“In the past if someone was famous or notorious, it was for something — as a writer or an actor or a criminal; for some talent or distinction or abomination. Today one is famous for being famous. People who come up to one in the street or in public places to claim recognition nearly always say: ‘I’ve seen you on the telly!’”

We live in an age when too many among us throw everything they have into achieving notoriety, a goal amplified by the internet. And in too many cases, they gain the sought-after prize without actually having done a decent thing to earn it.

Have the people who consider merely being famous a worthy, ultimate goal of their lives learned nothing from those who came before them, and what it cost them?

Of course, there are categories of famous persons.

I don’t know if the desire for fame is what drove Elvis Presley, but I am inclined to doubt it. He burst on the scene as few have done, and made a name for himself with the full exercise of his talents along lines of excellence. In later years, however, like so many before and after him, Elvis became a prisoner of his fame, unable to step out of his home to a diner for a bite to eat, or catch a movie with a friend, or just hang out, absent the paparazzi riding his tail.

My bet is that toward the end of his life, Elvis wished he’d done something else, like drive a truck. The price Elvis Presley paid for his fame was the loss of his own freedom of action, which is a terrible thing.

To my point, Neil Gabler honed the definition of celebrity to distinguish those who have gained recognition for having done almost nothing of significance — he called it the “Zsa Zsa Factor” in honor of Zsa Zsa Gabor, who parlayed her marriage to actor George Sanders into a brief movie career and the movie career into a much more enduring celebrity.

And what did Paris Hilton or the Kardashian clan do to achieve their fame other than being heiresses to a great family fortune?

More grimly, there is the set that hopes to rescue their lives from that anonymity that finally befalls 99 percent of human beings after they pass — excepting a handful — even to the desperate desire to write their names on the tablet of fame by doing terrible things. That is what drove Mark David Chapman to shoot and kill John Lennon.

People who talk that way seem about million miles away from the spirit of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ideal of a life well lived: “To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.”

That is a worthy goal.

Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@auburn-reporter.com.