We're all main characters now

How the internet demolished old theories of self.

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.

I don’t want to be the main character. I want to be a background guest at a White Lotus who checks out a full 24 hours before the murders start. —Kate

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Why do influencers name their babies like..that? It’s a tragedeigh.

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In 2013, blogger The Game Detective coined the term “main character syndrome,” defining it as an affliction that causes a person to “create and play a character as though they’re the lead and every other player character is part of the supporting cast.” A person suffering from this syndrome might focus on their personal narrative arc while dismissing the wants of those around him, taking up a majority of the oxygen in the room to ensure the actions of his peers contribute to the story he’s already written for himself in his head. Also, there are dragons.

The Game Detective had identified a phenomenon in tabletop roleplaying games like D&D. More than 10 years later, we seem to be surrounded by main characters in real life, or at least online. r/ImTheMainCharacter, created in 2021, defines the term as “People who act like they're the center of the world and worthy of all the attention.” On Twitter, someone’s controversial tweet makes them the “main character” of the day. But is main character syndrome the result of a personality flaw, a behavior people choose to exhibit, or a simple result of being raised on social media?

There is a strong piece of evidence for the latter idea, and it’s the “imaginary YouTube channel in your head.” Search “imaginary YouTube channel” on TikTok, and you get hundreds of videos of people making more or less the same joke: that, since they were children, their brain has had an awareness that if they were vlogging in that moment, this is what they’d say, and this is what it would look like: