Main Character Syndrome

With the rise of apps where people regularly record and post content comes a concern that everyday becomes more and more apparent and that is the way American individualism has led most people to view others as nothing but unplayable characters in their stories.

American individualism is a state of mind that hyper capitalism and consumerism pushes onto American society. Ads, TV shows, movies, and everyday products are marketed towards the individual to convince everyone to buy more of whatever they’re selling.

Businesses make more money the more that people buy their products, so they convince every single person that they all need their own cars, computers, and phones and they get to sell more.

This in turn breeds a society focused on the individual. Americans become convinced that they are the most important thing in their lives and that everything else around them should work to serve their own needs.

Don’t get me wrong, it is very important to put yourself first in a lot of circumstances, but this can also be taken too far.

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Loss of Empathy

Believing that everything and everyone else is there to make an impact on your life in some way can be a very dangerous form of thinking. Suddenly, other people go from being their own complex beings with emotions and needs to NPCs who only exist to give you things to do.

One of the biggest examples of this is videos on Tik Tok that say, “Look at all these NPCs” and it's just someone panning the camera around to people who happen to be around them for whatever reason. I’m sure it sounds harmless enough, but there are so many of these videos and everyone on the comments agrees with this feeling that everyone else is these fake people.

I’m not sure exactly which phenomenon started first, or if one caused the other, but I can’t talk about everyone treating other humans like NPCs without also mentioning the amount of projection that goes on in these kinds of videos.

People will see any semblance of a gesture or facial expression and project all kinds of completely unsubstantiated claims about what this person was thinking or what they were feeling. “Social media has made us so far removed from empathy that we forget that these are real people with real feelings and real lives that we do not know of.”

From Tik Toks like “couch guy” to random videos of people eating alone there will be thousands of people projecting onto them as if these people don’t have entire lives the internet knows nothing about. People take it upon themselves to make an entire story with bad guys and good guys out of less than 3-minute clips.

It brings up this notion that we feel we know more than anyone else, and our understanding of this world and of each other is so much deeper than that of others. It also pushes the idea that these people aren’t really people as much as they are objects for others entertainment.

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On the other hand, videos that kind of tell on people started off well-meaning with minorities recording white men and women who were accusing them of doing something illegal just because they happened to be sitting in their parked car, or with people recording police officers who were committing crimes that would not have gotten attention otherwise.

Then it morphed into everyone recording and taking pictures of someone to poke jabs at random things they’re doing and labeling people with reasonable complaints as “Karens.”

Now everyone who is not instantly willing to perform for strangers that are filming them are made to be the villains. People can’t take a joke and won’t just play along to pander to someone else’s ego, and in most cases this refusal leaves people bombarded with hate from everyone who views the video.

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Making Fun of Strangers

It has also become very common place, on platforms like Tik Tok, for everyday people to record other people without their knowing or their consent.

A youtuber by the name Kurtis Connor made a video about this not long ago, and in his video, he shows a Tik Tok of a man dancing in the street and tapping people he doesn’t know so they can give him high fives. In this video one of the people, he taps on the shoulder ends up crying afterwards.

The Tik Tok brings emphasis to this fact by stating in plain bold letters over the video that they are crying accompanied by a laughing crying emoji. Clearly this was posted to paint this random person in a negative light and a lot of the comments pushed it even further and made them seem like they were crying for attention.

In his video Kurtis explains that this person suffers from contamination OCD, and a random person had just touched them out of nowhere. This person was made fun of by thousands of people who not only do not know them, but also seem to have no problems with strangers filming and touching people without their consent.

There are also countless threads on twitter of people making fun of strangers and making assumptions about their lives. Kurtis also touches on this in his video and the way it has become common and expected that people will film or take pictures of you without you knowing to show all over the internet.

People should not be under this impression that everything and anything they do will be mercilessly mocked by hundreds of people they will never meet. Our phones and social media platforms have bred this mentality of self-surveillance where our new code of ethics aligns with acting on whatever will attract the least amount of ridicule and to record and take pictures of anything that could be ridiculed.

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A lot of videos that go viral and garner thousands upon thousands of views are of strangers that the person recording does not personally know with the intention of making fun of them or setting themselves apart as different and therefore better.

In the United States people are enabled to feel as though they are the special ones in the group that get to fulfill their dreams and make the necessary sacrifices on the way because it is their story. Like they are all the star of a show, and they get to point out to everyone else how ridiculous other people act.

This goes along the same vein as people who feel that because something is not affecting them personally then it is not a real issue anyone needs to worry about. Whether it's about human rights here in the U.S. or about the genocide taking place in Palestine.

If it does not involve the individual, then it is not a real issue.

Some people on social media monetize everyday people doing everyday things. Whether they are exploiting their negative reactions or indirectly asking everyone who views their content to make someone feel bad because they walked in front of their tripod at the gym.

Strangers are not treated as human beings they are treated as commodities that can make anyone famous if they are exploited the right way. We forget that we are a part of a community and seeing a snapshot of someone's life does not mean we know all there is to know about that person.