Main character syndrome is ruining public spaces

The world is not your personal soundstage

Today’s article is kind of rant-y but I’m just having that kind of a week 🫠

A couple minutes into my yoga class and I hear the characteristic iPhone “ding.” Annoying, but I brush it off. A few minutes later, and another ding. And another. Every five minutes or so, for the next hour of class, someone’s phone keeps going off. I lean into my calming yoga breaths to hold back the avalanche of frustration building in my chest. What really bothered me was not that it was disturbing class, but that somebody could continue to hear their phone go off and not do anything about it. As if, it didn’t matter to them how it might affect other people. As if, they were the only person in that room.

Whether it’s the now regular occurrence of phones going off in yoga class, or wanna-be-influencers filming themselves in your pilates sculpt studio, Main Character Syndrome has made us all seemingly oblivious to just how annoying we are in public. It’s not just on the fitness circuit — people text or talk loudly during movies, they blast music on the subway without headphones, they treat the West Village like it’s their own personal movie set. Some might say it’s just influencers who don’t know how to act in public, but I’d say we’ve all become a bit self obsessed these days. 

Jemima Kirke said it best back in 2022 when, asked on Instagram for advice for “unconfident young women” she responded with “I think you guys might be thinking about yourselves too much.”

While it often starts from a place of self empowerment, setting boundaries and recentering yourself (see the recent trend "Feel ugly? Make an edit of yourself to boost your confidence”) Main Character Syndrome has quickly morphed into something way more narcissistic and egotistical. As a result, combined with the culture of American individualism, we’ve developed a tendency to devalue public third spaces — treating them as extensions of our living rooms, and the people in them as NPCs.

It seems to be getting worse. Cinematic gender reveals are causing minor climate catastrophes. Anti-tourist sentiment is spreading throughout many cities in Europe as young travelers increasingly behave like “overgrown, perpetually drunk babies.” And then I saw this article in the Gothamist about how NYC pools kept closing last summer after people pooped in them. People. Not kids. Because when you’re indisputably the main character and everyone else is an irrelevant NPC, why not just take a dump in a public space? 

AI stands to only intensify this protagonist mentality. According to leaked internal prompts, ChatGPT was designed to “match the user’s vibe, tone, and generally how they are speaking,” effectively reflecting their own personality back to themselves. And when you’re having a delulu moment, ChatGPT isn’t going to call you out on your behavior, it’s going to enable it. Recently, OpenAI had to rescind a recent update to ChatGPT after users noticed it had made the chatbot extremely "sycophantic, overly flattering or agreeable," mirroring users' delusional beliefs about themselves and guiding them deeper into unhealthy, nonsensical narratives. We’re becoming so wrapped up in our own worlds that we don’t see how we could be supporting characters in someone else’s.

So how do we take control back of our public spaces?

In one of my favorite NYT op-eds as of late, “The Case for Telling Total Strangers to Shut Up” August Lenneman argues that reminding others how to behave in public is a civic duty. He writes:

“Shushing was once commonplace, if a little snooty and silly..[but] our ways of being annoying have worsened: As selfishness is normalized, calling people out for their bad behavior has become more fraught.”

What is incredibly ironic is that we’re so quick to shame each other online now, but we’re incredibly reticent to do so in public. It’s unfortunate because while online shaming often comes from a place of hatred or jealousy, a little in-person shaming might actually be for the greater good. To protect the peace for your fellow movie-goers, or the sacred space in a yoga class. A gentle nudge that there is a shared world beyond the self-reinforcing echo chambers of our phones — one that deserves to be respected.

But when that sense of community degrades while self-obsession simultaneously ascends, we don’t feel any sort of responsibility to each other to show up positively in those spaces, let alone protect them. As Anna Pompilio wrote for Midwesthetic , the issue with third spaces in particular has become not that there aren’t enough of them, but that people don’t actually want to engage with them in a meaningful way. People only want a physical “community” so far as it caters to their own needs and their ego.

The sad thing is that fulfilling this protagonist character arc actually depends on the interactions and relationships we build in these public spaces. No successful main characters of the film or literary worlds ever became fully self-actualized on their own. It’s through relationships that we get to know ourselves even better. In an essay about self-discovery, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche prioritized finding out who you were through interactions with others. “It is a painful and dangerous mission to tunnel into oneself and make a shaft,” he wrote. This goes hand in hand with our loneliness epidemic because it can be incredibly isolating to always be the main character. We’ve forgotten that it feels good not to be the only person in your story. Maybe by becoming a supporting character in someone else’s story, you can find more clarity in your own.

So stop defecating in public pools. And make sure your iPhone is silenced during yoga class. By thinking about others first, you might be able to realize your full potential as the main character you’ve always wanted to be.