In 356 BC, a man walked into the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus — one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world — and set it ablaze. Under torture, Herostratus confessed his motive: he burned the temple for no cause, no grievance, no god. He simply wanted his name remembered. The horrified Ephesians passed a decree making it a capital offence even to utter his name. The decree failed. Twenty-four centuries later, we remember the arsonist and have forgotten the architect. Western languages still carry the term “Herostratic fame”: destroying something precious merely to be noticed.

Herostratus was not an aberration. He was a preview. Today his descendants do not need torches; they need only a smartphone. The craving that drove one man to burn a wonder of the world now drives millions to curate, perform, exaggerate and provoke — anything to be seen. What the ancients treated as a crime, we have engineered into an economy. The question worth asking is whether the hunger for recognition is ambition at all, or an illness wearing ambition’s clothes.

Psychiatry answered this question long before Instagram posed it. Alfred Adler, the Viennese psychiatrist who founded Individual Psychology, taught that every human being strives to overcome a sense of inferiority — but the striving takes two roads. The healthy road runs through what he called social interest: contribution to family, community and mankind. The neurotic road runs through........

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