The challenge, for a narcissist, is to realize that we are all our own protagonists.
There’s a related genre of video that encourages viewers to use the visual language of TV to romanticize their lives. This often involves footage of quotidian activities — waiting for the subway, restocking a fridge, pouring a beverage — elevated through production techniques: flattering close-ups, curated props, the amateur’s equivalent of dedicated hair, wardrobe and makeup departments. By reframing mundane activities as the well-lit choreography of a story’s protagonist, these videos render the everyday with a kind of glamour and gravity. If all the world is now a set, “main characters” like these are rewarded by the attention economy — a fact that has inspired some users to turn “main-character energy” into something like a life philosophy. One woman, in the first of 22 “episodes” dedicated to proselytizing her “seasons theory” on TikTok, described how she improved “Season 3” of her life by asking herself what Serena van der Woodsen and Carrie Bradshaw would do. (Those main characters, of “Gossip Girl” and “Sex and the City,” narrativized their own lives for a blog and a newspaper column.)
It’s one thing to “romanticize” a day of remote work, as one TikTok user did, in an attempt to “become the main character” of her life. (She sought out a cafe that called to mind Central Perk and Luke’s Diner, fictional settings from “Friends” and “Gilmore Girls.”) But in other videos, users have expressed how certain types of narcissistic, self-dramatizing behavior — habits that were eventually branded “main-character syndrome” — have impoverished their friendships. Even the remedies people suggested for this pathology were formulated within the same televisual framework. In a conversation with the comedian Catherine Cohen, who described the fixation on “main-character energy” as “deranged,” the podcaster Hannah Berner proposed: “Let’s normalize sometimes being like, This season I’m in the back.”
The challenge, for a narcissist, is to realize that we are all our own protagonists — that any delusions we harbor about being the center of the story must be squared with a shared reality in which no one is. This is, broadly speaking, one of the core developmental processes that mark maturation into adulthood. There was a time when conventional wisdom defined an ideal state of adulthood as one of having shed all illusions of one’s centrality. But the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott challenged this notion in his 1971 book, “Playing and Reality”: People needn’t shed their illusions, he argued, only learn how to hold them in coexistence with wider reality, recognizing their own subjectivity for what it is. He suggested that, for children, playing with “transitional objects” could facilitate this process, by mediating inner and outer realities — a teddy bear, for instance, can be inanimate but simultaneously alive, a sewn-together object that also thinks and feels.
Scrolling past TikTok videos of “main characters” scrutinizing their “casts” for upcoming “seasons,” I often wonder if I am looking at a kind of transitional object. Life in the offscreen world rarely supplies its own narrative meaning; its messiness and mundanity don’t conform to the neat arcs produced by writers’ rooms. But the younger users coming of age on social media have encountered the world through an astonishing deluge of content in which life, mediated by narrative tropes, produces meaning that is legible by design. If maturation requires bridging these illusions with the formlessness of reality, then self-narrativization may be a kind of intermediary. In the same way that a child, playing with a teddy bear, learns how her imagination relates to the external world, users reconcile similar incongruities by telling the stories of their lives on TikTok. They combine the cinematic with the everyday, their centrality with their marginality, meaning with a lack thereof.
