According to legend, Narcissus kneeled every day beside a lake to admire his reflection, until one day he became so fascinated with his own beauty that he fell into the lake and drowned.
The goddess of the forest appeared at the lake and found the water transformed into salty tears. She asked the lake why it cried for Narcissus, assuming it had admired Narcissus’s beauty.
The lake replies that it had been enjoying its own beauty reflected in Narcissus’s eyes.
Main character syndrome 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 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 are merely the insignificant ghosts who happen to intrude on their spaces.
Akin to chess pieces, you have agency only in the development of the MC’s story. In current slang, you 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 (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, a part of the scenery.
Another way to view NPCs is to imagine a zombie, a being that, while physically identical to a normal human being, does not have conscious experience.
If a 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 are, perhaps, just so many zombies.
Our ideas about who we are require each other’s engaged participation.
We must see others as fully human, and be engaged with each other as moral beings to understand who we are, and who we are in relation to others and to the world.
But the main character narrative denies all these possibilities. It is destructive to views of human beings as fundamentally relational and interdependent, and poses a threat to two important experiences of being human: the first is connection to others; the second is love.
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.
Te answer has something to do with the kinds of stories MCS offers. On the one hand, narrative approaches to morality and identity centre both speaking and hearing, sharing and emphasising the importance of shared discourse, of mutual intelligibility.
They point toward the moral significance not just of one’s own stories, but of the narratives of others as guides to understanding the fundamental human identities.
On the other hand, narratives spun by the main character have little interest in, or patience for, the stories of others; they are anything but interdependent.
They care nothing for mutual intelligibility. Only the main character, his perspective, his story and his solitary self, matter. In this version of narrative selfhood, there is room only for the singular speaker, and his singularly important chronicle.
Yet, as narrativists will often note, not all narratives are good, or desirable, or to be encouraged.
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.
While main characters are singularly important beings in their own minds, this importance comes in many flavors.
Let’s begin with the usual culprit, entertainment and social media, where they can be often found in their native environment.
The ‘main character’ hashtag has been viewed, mostly approvingly, millions of times on TikTok and on Instagram, and #maincharacter accompanies tens of thousands of posts.
Daily, social media netizens are sold the idea that becoming the heroes of their lives is the only thing that matters.
But it is not just social media: so many of our films focus on the central quest of the hero, who must overcome, outsmart, outrun, outperform and, in the end, glory in his victory.
This hero’s journey, this monomyth, is on full display in The Hunger Games movies (2012-23), the Divergent film series (2014-16), the Spider-Man universe (2018-24), and The Maze Runner films (2014-18), which are but a handful of relatively recent examples.
There are sidekicks and other characters, to be sure – but, in the end, to quote the much older film Highlander (1986), ‘there can be only one’.
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:
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.
There have always been 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.
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 NPCdom, 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.
The dilemma becomes harder when we hear tha we are living in the era of Attention Economy; but outside of mass media consumption channels, there is a real economy that couldn’t care less about attention, in the contrary they seek to have as less attention drawn to them as possible.
Are you the main character?
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