Main Character Syndrome

Driving on one of New York’s poorly maintained and crowded roads, I found myself in a situation one can more safely observe through numerous YouTube ‘bad driver’ videos: a driver for whom all other traffic apparently ceased to exist confidently pulled into a lane I already happened to occupy. After a quick manoeuvre that probably spared me a role in one of the aforementioned videos, I said, perhaps louder than was necessary, to nobody in particular: ‘Is this [deleted] aware of anything but his own [deleted]?’

Because I am a philosopher, and thus tend to be rather bad at letting go of ideas – especially ideas without good answers – my close brush with YouTube fame led me to consider other instances of what has come to be called ‘main character syndrome’ (MCS) or, perhaps more annoyingly, ‘main character energy’. Not a clinical diagnosis but more a way of locating oneself in relation to others, and popularised by a number of social media platforms, MCS is a tendency to view one’s life as a story in which one stars in the central role, with everyone else a side character at best. Only the star’s perspectives, desires, loves, hatreds and opinions matter, while those of others in supporting roles are relegated to the periphery of awareness. Main characters act while everyone else reacts. Main characters demand attention and the rest of us had better obey.

You have probably heard of MC behaviour – or perhaps even witnessed it online or in person. A TikToker and her followers physically push aside those inconvenient extras ‘ruining’ their selfies – and then post their grievances on social media. A man on a crowded subway watches a loud sports broadcast without headphones while ignoring other commuters’ requests to turn it down a bit. This is no mere rudeness: in the narrowly circumscribed world of main characters, the rest of us are merely the insignificant ghosts who happen to intrude on their spaces. Akin to chess pieces, or perhaps to animatronic figures, we have agency only in the development of the MC’s story. In current parlance, we are non-player characters (or NPCs) – a term that originated in traditional tabletop games to describe characters not controlled by a player but rather by the ‘dungeon master’. In video games, NPCs are characters with a predetermined (or algorithmically determined) set of behaviours controlled by the computer. Rather than agents with a will and intent, NPCs are there to help the MC in his quest, to intersect with the MC in preset ways, or to simply remain silent – a kind of prop, or perhaps human-shaped furniture, a part of the scenery. Another way to view NPCs is to imagine what the philosopher David Chalmers calls a philosophical zombie, or p-zombie, a being that, while physically identical to a normal human being, does not have conscious experience. If a p-zombie laughs, it’s not because it finds anything funny – its behaviour is purely imitative of the real (main character!) individual. For someone convinced of their MC identity, the rest of us are, perhaps, just so many zombies. (...)

As a philosopher and a narrativist, I am an unabashed supporter of the view that selves are something that we create together, through shared stories. What is a narrative? In short, anything that can be read, spoken, heard, written, viewed or otherwise expressed – and this certainly includes social media. In telling stories, we create and reveal who we think we are; in listening to the stories of others, we help to mould and sustain them as persons. Stories are thus foundational to how we view the world and our place in it, and through them we can make ourselves morally intelligible to ourselves and to others. (...)

MCS offers the wrong kinds of stories: harmful, isolating, solipsistic, amoral. And it begins, in large part, with the assumed superiority of the main character’s self-conception.... Daily, social media denizens are sold the idea that becoming the heroes of their lives is the only thing that matters. (...)

Absorbing these messages and mimicking the voiceovers of lead characters in films and other media, we also try to narrate our lives – often, directly into our smart phones – and share with the world all the ways in which our paths, our storylines, our perspectives, are the ones that matter, the ones worth paying attention to; our voices the voices that are worth hearing. We demand from others, both directly and indirectly: ‘Stop everything, and watch me – the hero!’

But isn’t it a bit too easy to blame media for our growing obsession with our own importance? Long before the internet, let alone social media, people have shared their narratives in diaries, autobiographies, poems and so on, bringing their lives to centre stage. Generations of Americans have been taught to pursue happiness – individual, personal happiness – above all else. There have always been solipsists, narcissists, sociopaths and simple attention-seekers – social media did not invent the me-first typology.

And yet, can we help ourselves in this time of global access to others, and to ourselves? Can we – well, some of us, anyway – resist demanding an audience when one is always there, ready to be engaged? Perhaps not. As the clinical psychologist Michael G Wetter said in a Newsweek interview in 2021, main character syndrome is:

the inevitable consequence of the natural human desire to be recognized and validated merging with the rapidly evolving technology that allows for immediate and widespread self-promotion … Those who exhibit characteristics consistent with the experience of main character syndrome tend to want to create a narrative that is dependent on an audience to validate their story. What good is a story or movie if there is no audience?

Media, social and otherwise, has made it easier, cheaper and, importantly, more socially acceptable to act out our MC monomyths. We can upload photos, videos, entire films about ourselves – and we can choose how we are perceived through clever tricks of light and angles, apps and filters that tell exactly the stories we want told. All this because we want to get noticed, we want to be seen – and seen as someone who matters, as the main someone who matters. As the influencer Ashley Ward noted on TikTok in 2020:

You have to start romanticising your life. You have to start thinking of yourself as the main character because, if you don’t, life will continue to pass you by, and all the little things that make it so beautiful will continue to go unnoticed.

Not being seen, not being noticed as someone who matters means relegating oneself to NPC-dom – a nobody, a nothing, a mannequin without a personal story or agency, going through a prewritten script of a grey, insignificant life. To be seen, on the other hand, is to be happy. This happiness requires making sure that others know that one is happy, successful, better than those NPCs – in other words, it calls for constant curation of one’s image, one’s narrative, one’s self. If one is not the MC, someone else surely will be. This is, for many, simply an intolerable fate.

Of course, blaming all media, or only social media, for MCS would be inaccurate. Perhaps unsurprisingly, main characters have emerged in places where psychopathy and narcissism have always reigned: in politics, academia and other public-facing institutions. From a US president who claims that ‘I alone can fix’ the nation’s many crises, to news and manipulative media personalities who insist that they and only they are telling the truth, to politicians who cannot – or do not wish to – tell the difference between being famous and being effective, MCS is becoming the norm.

There are worse offenders still. As an academic, I would be remiss if I did not include those within academia, or those solipsistic enough to call themselves ‘social leaders’ or, even worse, ‘thought leaders’. (...)

I take self-creating narratives to be fundamental to who we are – by telling and hearing stories about ourselves, about others and about the world, we come to understand who, why and how we might be. Yet the kind of main-character storytelling that is presently ascendant does very little to form mutually constructed identities and, instead, reduces the complexity of human relationships to simplistic binaries of ‘me’ and ‘not me’, ‘them’ and ‘us’, ‘hero’ and ‘villain’. Instead of co-creators and co-authors of each other’s selves, what remains is an anxiety-producing, shallow, consumerist competition for the ring of the one true self, the one true main character. We thus become rivals, competitors and players in what looks like a zero-sum game of winners and losers. 

by Anna Gotlib, Aeon |  Read more:

Image: xkcd.com

[ed. More than just another term for narcissism (a subset of the type). What's particularly galling is that this behavior is constantly rewarded - with fauning accolades for celebrities, sports stars, musicians, CEOs/billionaires, and anyone else who somehow manages to grab a momentary piece of public attention (an important value metric - along with money. Lots of money).]