https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/24/arts/television/ellen-degeneres-netflix-for-your-approval.html
In a serious interlude that stood out among many references she makes to caring what others think of her, she says that in show business you must care, because “it’s the only real currency.”
I believe she believes that. Popularity and how people see you clearly matter a lot. But there are other currencies to measure success: A joke well-told, the satisfaction of a thought perfectly expressed. DeGeneres has had a remarkable, pathbreaking career, but one of her greatest legacies — having her sitcom character, essentially an avatar for her, come out of the closet in the 1990s — led to a drop in the show’s ratings and ultimately its cancellation. Only a doomed worldview sees that as failure.
She probably understands this. But you hear it more in the jokes than in the serious parts, the punchlines about the little lies we tell ourselves. “I used to say I didn’t care what people thought of me,” she says wryly. “Looking back, I realized I said that at the height of my popularity.”