How Main Character Syndrome became the go-to coping mechanism of a restless generation
We live in a golden age of public performance. Academics have even found that in our dreams, we are becoming more aware of ‘performing’ life, demonstrating how deeply embedded this way of moving through the world has become in our subconscious. Our lives and daily activities are now content farms to offer up for the algorithmic gods.
Every coffee cup, street corner, and latte-art heart has the potential to be content; each represents a potential building block in the carefully curated highlight reel of our lives that we call an Instagram feed. But as we scroll through the endless carousel of perfect lives and never-ending Ws, the quiet suspicion creeps in: everyone else seems to be living them better.
The problem: chronic comparison, powered by a culture where everyone is their own utterly complicit paparazzo.
The solution: learn to see these digital lives for what they are - that is, not documentary truth, but an art form. A self-conscious, heavily edited and often painfully censored collage. Reassure yourself that Instagram influencers are just as depressed and unfulfilled as any 20th-century artist worth their weight in immersive projection experiences - only now, their studio is the algorithm, and their medium is the curated self.
Main Character Syndrome: Nihilism, but Make It Cinematic
Main Character Syndrome (MCS) is the externalisation of this inner monologue. With MCS, our lives become a narrative where we’re the protagonist, our friends are the supporting cast, and the city we live in serves as the set (with NPC bystanders everywhere). MCS tasks us with casting off our Copernican shackles and rearranging the universe with ourselves at the centre. Little old me? Damn right.
It’s a coping strategy for nihilism, with a knowing wink. If the universe has no inherent meaning, you may as well pretend you’re in a beautifully shot indie film. Your life is the script. You choose the soundtrack. And you style your outfits as though the cinematographer is always just out of frame.
But there’s a problem: in this film, you are the writer, director, and star - but the plot is still largely out of your control. You might have some creative input, but it remains subject to studio oversight (which we could consider the whims of maniacal politicians or financial circumstances largely beyond your control). Manifestation culture insists you can will yourself into a life of Valentino rockstuds and rooftop martinis, and if you haven’t achieved them yet, that’s simply because you didn’t dream big enough. Everything being “visible” implies that it is also “accessible.” In the West, we are told that we have unlimited personal freedom, and although compared to our ancestors, we do, it is naive to think that social and structural limitations have no bearing on a life’s trajectory.
The Instagram Reality Gap
We know rationally that on Instagram, we’re only seeing the highlight reel. But its’ dopamine-driven design still rewards us for curating the most aspirational moments of our lives. The most flattering light. The most symmetrical cappuccino foam art. The most bronzed and buxom cleavage.
It’s the cult of self-esteem for our modern age, but perhaps more worryingly, the focus isn’t on improving oneself. Being the main character implies being compelling and ‘well written’ - in the case of visual media, it usually requires being attractive (and wealthy, young, white and straight) but it doesn’t necessitate being a good person. Or being stable. Or being kind. Being the main character is about YOU, not about what you can do for others.
MCS erases the need for simple, daily fulfilment as filler content. Film characters rarely have to sit for 7 hours a day on Zoom calls, only coming back to life to cherish a midmorning homemade matcha as though it were the elixir of life. And when they do, such banalities are condensed into montages which generally prelude some huge life-transforming event; only ever acting as the dull build-up to complete emancipation. The less exciting elements of the human condition aren’t considered where the Main Character is concerned. Morals, stability, or everyday kindness are optional extras.
Make no mistake - Main Character Syndrome is not an illness for teenage girls alone. Once, power figures were untouchable. Now they’re just as absurd and meme-able as anyone else. Perhaps more. Politicians dance awkwardly on TikTok. Princes give Pizza Express alibis. Museum directors jump on trending audio in the hopes of viral success. In this attention economy, no one is above the feed. Everyone becomes afflicted with MCS.
The Mysterious Coffee Shop Girl Archetype
The mysterious coffee shop girl is a modern muse: part introverted Tumblr girl, part Lana Del Rey devotee, part library-card abuser. She’s an archetype so familiar that Instagram users now post lists of “baby names that embody mysterious girl in a coffee shop vibes.” The top pick? Ramona. A name so rare it hasn’t been common since 1972.
The Mysterious Coffee Shop girl is, in some ways, the ultimate personification of MCS. In simply existing in the homogenised cafes of 2020s treat-culture she invites questions such as: who is that girl? What is she writing? How can she focus on that book with everything else going on around her? Like all archetypes, she’s a fantasy: a still image that suggests depth without ever requiring it. She only exists to be seen and to cultivate the lazy mystique of others.
Liminal Spaces and the Desire for a Pause Button
I’ve long felt that the internet’s obsession with liminal spaces such as empty malls, neon-lit hallways, decaying theme park rides or schools may be a quiet rebellion against haul culture. These spaces are neutral yet eerie, stripped of the noise of productivity and ‘Influencers in the World’ style self-promotion. They’re the post-apocalyptic shells of consumerism, where life has been paused mid-scroll. Liminal spaces reflect an unnameable unease.
But perhaps the fascination with the liminal is also connected to the spread of ‘Main Character Syndrome.’ This is content with no subject; nobody in the underpasses or swimming pools, or boarded-up shopping centres. They’re the fantasy of a world where the narrative stops, just for a moment. Where no one is the main character because the story itself is suspended and replaced with a nebulous feeling of dread, but also a deeply buried nostalgia or comfort for familiar motifs from childhood. As the skeletons of human life, liminal spaces signify a subdued fantasy of the end, or at the very least of a ‘pause’ button.
Main Character Syndrome is a way to reject the existential dread of living on an insignificant and dying planet. By curating a narrative around ourselves, we feel as though we can impose structure on chaos. But this is an illusion that risks us all becoming solipsistic Instababes, steadfastly ignoring one another and relegating any external plight to the sphere of inconvenient truth. By making an ‘image’ of something, we are creating an object of it, alienating us emotionally from what is contained in what we see. This removal of the subject from the object harms our ability to connect, to fully feel and to think through things with more clarity. MCS essentially promotes the externalisation of the inner monologue and, I would argue, puts our precious, delicate and spiritually important inner lives at risk.