There’s a particular kind of magic that happens on late-night walks with your headphones in, a carefully curated playlist humming in your ears, and the dim glow of streetlights flickering over empty sidewalks. For a moment, you feel like the protagonist of a coming-of-age film. The background blurs, and your inner dialogue sharpens. It’s cinematic. It’s romantic. It’s main-character energy.
I used to lean into these moments. I’d pretend someone was filming my life to be edited into a gentle, artsy documentary of soft lighting, deliberate zooms, and a mood-setting score. I was framing my life; curating it.
This energy wasn’t just a fantasy. Rather, it felt like a way to survive. If I could pretend there was a story unfolding, then every awkward or lonely moment had a purpose. A narrative arc. A meaning.
The idea of “main character energy” surged into the cultural mainstream sometime in the late 2010s. Then, the concept fully exploded during the pandemic when isolation forced us to turn to our phones for entertainment and comfort. On TikTok and Instagram, creators began documenting hyper-curated slices of their days: pouring matcha in golden hour lighting, overhead shots of hands stirring tea, crying prettily in the mirror with a Lana Del Rey track playing in the background. We were aestheticizing our lives.
On the surface, this trend seemed empowering. “Main character energy” was a call to reclaim narrative agency, especially for those who’ve been historically sidelined in mainstream media. For many groups so often cast as the sidekick or the best friend, women, queer people, and people of color, stepping into “main character” roles online became a kind of resistance. We could place ourselves at the center of our own stories. We didn’t have to wait for a Hollywood script to validate our existence. Instead, we could write it ourselves, one post at a time.
But somewhere along the way, that empowerment began to blur into performance.
Because here’s the thing: being the main character requires an audience. Even if it’s just a mental one. And when every walk has to be wistful, every meal artfully plated, every moment curated for resonance, who are we really living for?
The pressure to be seen as beautiful, mysterious, unbothered, and “main character material” reinforces the same systems it claims to subvert. Suddenly, your healing needs to be photogenic. Your solitude needs to be aesthetic. Your sadness has to look good in 1080p. We pretend it’s authentic, but it’s filtered, paused, and cropped.
“Your sadness has to look good in 1080p.”
There’s also something exhausting about always needing to be interesting, to have a “vibe,” and to act like every inconvenience is a cosmic sign meant to teach you something. Not everything is foreshadowing. Not every barista is a love interest. Sometimes you’re just tired and your phone is out of storage.
The irony is that in trying to be the main character, we risk forgetting how to be friends, siblings, strangers, and witnesses. We start looking at others as background characters in our story instead of seeing them as people living complex, rich stories of their own.
And as we all race to be the protagonist, we risk losing the beauty of being supporting characters in each other’s lives who listen, witness, and just be. Not everything has to be content.
I still romanticize the mundane sometimes. I still make playlists for specific emotional arcs. I still have an album of pictures labeled “for the memoir.” But now, I try to remind myself that real life doesn’t need a storyline to be meaningful. Growth doesn’t always come with a three-act structure. Joy isn’t less real just because no one’s watching.
Maybe the most radical thing we can do is let ourselves be messy, backgrounded, unscripted, and ordinary. Maybe the most liberating energy isn’t being the main character at all. It’s just being.