There is No Titular Role

TikTok continues to set the Gen Z mood and supplies us with new material for the stand-up specials we perform alone in our rooms. It also has led to mass amounts of discussion of and participation in “being the main character.” If this sounds ripped from a “romanticize your life” Tumblr post, that’s because it is. Acting like the main character, or having a main character complex, is not a new concept. I feel like it’s been embraced and amplified by a new social media platform, and therefore affects the way a lot of us are viewing our lives in relation to others.

Don’t lie to yourself - you want to feel like the main character. It’s a fact of life. I don’t care about all the irony posting and making fun of the trend and declaring that you’re more like the funny supporting character or that main characters are all annoying and boring. I’ve laughed at and liked those TikTok and tweets, too. We’re all self-aware to a fault, where we know exactly what we want to be (the main character) but also know that we probably aren’t that. And, we also know that to say that with complete seriousness is to make yourself a joke, so you make other jokes and spawn ironic viral TikToks that tell us we have to stop romanticizing our lives, because they aren’t that interesting and we’re actually not all that cool. Which is true. Basically, our generation’s obsession with being the main character is all just one giant feedback loop that I don’t know that we’ll ever be able to fully get out of.

My personal definition of what it means to be the main character has stemmed from media depicting coming of age, a genre that has been wholly embraced and amplified by recent generations. Main characters in these are always slightly ~different~ from their peers, whether just in their own imagination or in actuality. Over the journey of the movie, show, book, whatever, the character finds a significant piece of who they “truly are” and experiences a shift in how they view their life, realizing that they aren’t the center of the universe by way of moving from Point A to Point B through recognizable teenage snapshots: their first relationship, going to a party, working through a personal issue or trauma, etc. (It should be noted that the coming of age genre has been rightly criticized for only depicting one type of experience, the white, middle class experience, and that not everyone can see themselves in these oft-referenced main characters. It can be hard, then, for some to relate to the cultural concept of wanting to be the main character. Does it mean the desire to live a white experience only? These are critical questions we should be asking ourselves when we refer to wanting to be the main character, and main characters should not be references to only white characters.)

In living out our real life main character fantasies, we look for these specially crafted moments that would deem us as such - our Perks of Being a Wallflower tunnel scene, for instance; our moment where we fall a little bit in love with life and with who we are. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with seeking these moments in real life. We all have our niches, our likes and dislikes and personal creation of who we are in these years. But the thing is, we aren’t characters, as much as we wish that we were. Life isn’t necessarily going to give us a satisfying narrative arc or a clean denouement where we can imagine ourselves going on to live our best lives now that we know who we are and what we want. We don’t only have one goal or obstacle; we actually have to live beyond our high school graduations instead of just imagining a rosy future for our character. Coming of age still happens post-grad and post teenage years, believe it or not. So there’s a downside to characterizing ourselves in this way, in that we have to continue living and working through our bad decisions and maybe losing friends and lovers and disappointing ourselves. We have to face the fact that our everyday lives aren’t being broadcasted for an audience that is rooting for our success and swathed in neon lighting. If we choose only to live as if we were, in fact, the main character, and we only make decisions based on that personal premise, are we being ourselves, or just a version of ourselves curated by a search for aesthetics and a laundry list of definitive coming of age moments?

A lot of the influence on our generation to be the main character comes not just from coming of age media but also from social media, and the performative nature it encourages. If we’re already thinking about the “main character” version of ourselves, then social media is an avenue to convince others and ourselves that that’s the life we’re living. It’s a part of the larger conversation that encompasses why we feel like we need to be documenting things all the time. In addition to wanting to hold onto and relive that memory, it’s because we feel like we need to prove we were there, that it really happened. Taking it a step further, our frequent documentation of every event, day, or mood of our lives on social media serves to prove to others that we were a part of something special, or that our lives are inherently more special because we did this thing or took this picture or video. Aside from the fact that social media is performative by nature and we won’t ever be able to get away from that, excess insistence on romanticization of our own lives through social media creates a world where we’re constantly concerned about only our own narrative and how someone else would view that.

But, we’re too self-aware to fully trap ourselves into believing that social media is real life. Of course we know that it’s not; we’re the ones who post on it the most! The issue lies precisely with that self-awareness. For instance, I’ve seen a lot of “day in my life in insert-big-city-here” TikToks or just beautifully edited videos with pretty people going about an ideal day - getting coffee, thrift shopping, hanging out with friends. The creators of these videos curate them to look and feel a certain way, knowing that while their day somewhat resembles the video, the video elevates it to another stratosphere, making the mundane look enviable and the highs and lows of emotion aesthetically pleasing. The video exists to elevate; that is the intention. Both the creator and viewer are aware that it is not that way in reality, and they’re not necessarily swayed by a false reality but rather a longing for that feeling to be their reality. And, by the creator posting that video and curating their life like that, they are to some extent making that their reality or to some extent are comfortable with allowing illusion to become reality. This is where the line blurs between performance and real life, and where the feedback loop appears, where we’re self-aware enough to know what’s real and what’s not but where we wish the unattainable to be real anyway and view others as having that unattainable from the way they present themselves on social media.

Furthermore, if we’re constantly characterizing ourselves through our social media performance, and that performance is seeping into our daily lives (doing things to cater to that performance or how they would look to others watching our life), are we just living as a brand and ceasing to live as a person? Are we actually seeking out opportunities to be the main character for personal enjoyment and fulfillment or are we branding ourselves as someone who is the main character?

If the purpose of feeling or wanting to act like the main character is to feel special, chosen, beautiful, worth paying attention to, and everyone is feeling or acting this way, doesn’t that in a way negate how we’re trying to set ourselves apart since everyone else is doing it too? The desire to be the main character bonds us but also divides us, leading to such niches as the “sides” of TikTok and the idea that one type of person is better, or more fitting, for the role of the main character than another (see: the whole bruh girl versus girly girl trend that was going around TikTok a few months ago, which is totally rooted in internalized misogyny, or, the idea that the “indie kid” aesthetic and those who adhere to it are cooler and better than people who don’t). We want to have our feelings validated and to feel connected to others through shared experiences, but we also still want to feel singular and set apart. Gen Z constantly walks this fine line on social media.

I think that we as a generation are so desperate to write ourselves into this characterized narrative because we want to believe that we will have a happy and satisfying ending, and we want to escape from the everyday doldrums of life into something more beautiful, more cinematic. We want to see ourselves as special and worthy of having a whole movie center around our story, if you will, and we want our lives to be grand and exciting enough for people to care to pay attention. We want to be reassured that we are more than our boring afternoons, our suburban towns, our below average grades. We want to be remembered.

Why the emphasis on remembrance? In a world where we are increasingly seeing the detriments and struggle associated with adulthood in late stage capitalism, our generation is concerned about the trappings of 9 to 5s, retirement plans that may never come to fruition, the skyrocketing costs of education, and a corporate emphasis on free labor, overproductivity, the lauding of burnout culture, and seeing employees not as people, but as commodities. When we’re constantly encouraged to brand ourselves for the benefit of universities, internships, jobs, and even relationships, we lose a sense of self. Is wanting to act like the main character a release from that? Maybe. We want to carve out a place for ourselves.

So, if we feel like we’re performing all the time (for social media, for the workforce, for any application ever), or, we inevitably fall into a kind of performance because of the standards and expectations set for us, where does that leave our desire to live the life of a main character?

I don’t think it’s wrong to want that. I still do. And I don’t fully think that escaping the allure of a main character existence is the way to stop all feelings of a performative existence. But if we constantly act as the main character as a means of escape, we’ll keep coming up against the same barriers that we tried to get away from in the first place, trapping ourselves in that feedback loop of self-awareness and unattainability.

So we want to feel like we have room to be ourselves, to be special, to feel the excitement of pivotal moments in our lives. We have to distance ourselves from being caught in that feedback loop, distance ourselves from personal branding and reliance on aesthetics and the feeling that life should have a nice narrative structure. It doesn’t. Main character branding was here before TikTok, and it will be here after TikTok, so how are you defining your life experience apart from these things?

We all deserve to feel like the main character sometimes,but I think those cinematic moments still happen in everyday life - the way the sun slants through the window at golden hour, driving down the highway blasting your favorite song, dancing in the parking lot at midnight with your friends. You don’t have to be the chosen one to get to experience these joys, because they don’t only occur to those with a main character mentality. Your life is special and worth enjoying apart from your school, your job, the social media of your peers, and you don’t have to feel like you need to measure up to any made-up construct of what life is supposed to look like. So, crank up your “Heroes,” and hit the highway.