There’s a scene you’ve seen a hundred times: headphones in, phone angled just right, a low-saturation filter brushing over the sky. Lana hums in the background. The caption reads something like, “Just a main character walking home alone.” You scroll past, only to find another. And another. Each more aesthetic, more softly tragic, more carefully unscripted than the last.
What started as a confidence-boosting meme in 2020, encouraging people to romanticise their lives, has mutated into a full-blown identity performance. “Main character energy” is now a personality type, a lifestyle aesthetic, and most insidiously, a pressure. Because when everyone’s the lead, no one’s allowed to be background.
We are scripting ourselves in real-time, living as if the camera is always rolling. The lines blur: Are you going through a breakup or documenting it for a healing arc? Did you wear that outfit because it’s you, or because it fits your page’s narrative? Even simple rituals like solo dates, coffee runs, or reading in the park are no longer just moments. They’re content pillars. In an age of algorithms, our selfhood is increasingly shaped by what looks good in the feed.
There’s a quiet collapse happening here. When we live by the feed’s logic, our inner lives start to feel fictional until they’re externally affirmed. It’s not enough to cry; we must show ourselves crying. Not enough to grow, we need visible proof of the glow-up. We document moments instead of inhabiting them, watching our lives unfold like a second screen experience.
As cultural theorist Mark Fisher once noted, capitalism’s genius lies in turning everything, even rebellion, into content. The Main Character Obsession is no different. It packages personality, emotions, and even suffering into bite-sized moments of palatable relatability. We’re no longer just living stories, we’re storyboarding them.
The true irony? The more we chase main character energy, the less main it feels. When everyone’s performing a lead role, who’s left to witness it? We aren’t just starring in our lives, we’re directing, scoring, and monetising them.
And with that comes burnout. Identity fatigue. The aching desire to log off and be boring again.
The solution might lie in becoming unremarkable on purpose. Not everything needs to be shared. Not every walk requires a theme song. Maybe the most rebellious act isn’t becoming the main character but refusing the story altogether.
Because the real main characters? They’re too caught up in the chaos, the quiet, the ordinary wonder of living to even care if anyone’s watching.
Maybe the truest main character energy is walking home in silence and not posting about it.
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