The Endless Performance

Why We All Secretly Want to Be the Main Character

You wake up late. Again. You stumble out of bed, heart already racing. The seven-step morning routine you so deliberately planned at 3 a.m.? Thrown out of the window. There is no time. There is never enough time.

As you rush through the blur of toothpaste and half-buttoned shirts, a strange thought comes to mind:

What if this is part of the story?

Part of something bigger, something worth telling?

Because deep down, you are not just living. You are performing. Even now, you are framing the chaos, bending over backward mentally to turn it into something that bears meaning. A scene. A character development. A new beginning.

We are constantly surrounded by stories: from books to movies to Instagram reels to TikToks. The tools change, but the allure stays.

As humans, we are constantly aware of ourselves and our surroundings. Like a camera, we capture what is presented to us. Somewhere along the way, real life began to feel less interesting than the version we imagined. A narrative is not the truth. It is a packaging. An oftentimes pretty one, but still, a package. So we edit, reframe, romanticize. Somewhere between Disney movies and Instagram stories, we learned that if something did not look cinematic, it was not worth remembering.

In response, we gave everything a narrative. Everything gets to be part of a story, an objective, instead of an isolated event. Even the situations which are at best unnecessairy get to be part of a story. Through this process, you are turning yourself into the main character. Bad dates become character development. Friend breakups turn into plot twists. Mental breakdowns? How poetic. Just let me adjust the light and slightly set the camera to the right angle…

This attitude is understanable. We do not want mere existence. We want significance.

In a world where everything seems to be important and insignificant simultaneously, being remembered feels safer than being real.

By the way, this is not a new concept. It represents the “chosen one” archetype, which is based on Jesus himself. This persona in storytelling is the literal definition of the main character. Variations of it can be observed in our cultural landscape from Harry Potter to Katniss Everdeen. Every chosen one is unique in their own way. But there are patterns: the “chosen one” is the heart of the story. They are the protagonist who struggles, grows, and ultimately prevails. They hold the spotlight, and sometimes, even the plot seems to bend in their favor. No wonder it sounds so appealing.

With the rise of social media, a new edition of the “chosen-one” archetype emerged: the influencer. Curated, camera-ready and algorithm-approved, they seem handpicked by fate. In reality, it is the platform’s algorithm which decides. These “digital chosen ones” polish their lives into highlights and frame struggles as eras. Through filters, captions, and perfectly timed posts, moments are not only shared. Narratives are being crafted. They are not only the main characters but also the authors of their stories.

However, being the protagonist is not only about seeming to be better. It is also about significane and relevance. It is about feeling like your heartbreak is carrying cultural significance, like some teeny tiny life choices shape your entire destiny, like your life is something others might one day quote. Because for you, it feels like it.

These trains of thought can help to navigate the current societal landscape. The world is chaotic. Lately, even more than that. Many people had protected childhoods, which sheltered them from the world. When they grow up, they are confronted with the harsh reality and come to realize: the world is on fire. Literally. Climate change, housing crises and worldwide political tension are only a few of the fruit basket of problems we are facing. Nothing feels stable. So we cope the way we were trained to since childhood: with stories.

We are reading, watching, consuming and ultimatively becoming them.

To escape the current mundanity, we dress like a Pinterest board. We give ourselves a glow-up and call it a new era. We read books and base our entire personality around them. Statements like “I‘m becoming unbearable after I’ve watched this” or “My new personality came with the mail” are turing from ironic jokes to reality. Somewhere in that blur, we start to believe that this is working. We only need just one more sweater, to complete our aesthetic, just this specific oil colour, and then, then we will start actually painting. The consumer culture sends their greetings.

A life that is constantly narrated starts sooner or later to feel like a performance. Like we are constantly mid-audition, and everyone else is holding a scorecard. There is comfort in coherence. A beginning, a climax, a neat little resolution.

But to whose standards are you holding yourself? And who tells you when the performance was a success? And why?

If you do not decide for yourself what you want, someone else will. And they will not ask for edits.

And sometimes, life just happens. There is no era. Just flatlines. Disappointments. Sudden endings with no catharsis. And if you have built your self-worth on the idea that your life should be a great story, those flatlines hold the potential to break you.

Who are you, if you can not uphold your narrative? What if something happens, that was not part of the outline? What then?

There is also another underestimated danger, which is subtle at first. Your best friend tells you she is scared, and you nod like the social script told you to. Later, you write a caption about being “grateful for the real ones.” It gets 74 likes. Their problems feel like subplots. Their victories feel like competition. Your empathy starts to shrink in service of your spotlight. You slowly begin to see others as mere side characters of your own story, instead of seeing them for the multidimensional people they are.

This dynamic can circle in the other direction too: you start comparing your real, boring life to someone else’s curated highlights playlist. You scroll past a stranger’s engagement, and it feels like failure. You caption your burnout as a “selflove and recovery era” because admitting you are just tired and not transforming feels too raw and shameful. When your worth depends on what is visible and measurable, you hand the power over your narrative to forces outside yourself. Suddenly, love is a metric. Healing is a timeline. Even grief has to be curated.

If your worth depends on the applause, what happens in the silence?

So, what is the alternative?

You need to understand that no one should define your worth or your sense of self but you. If you do not define it, others will do it for you. When you start living by the narrative others create, you are no longer being yourself. Even if you assume this narrative was your own idea. You are performing and conforming to an image that may not necessairily reflect who you are. You are not the performance. You are the person beneath the applause.

What if you could still matter, without needing to be the main character? What if you choose to have multiple main characters in your life‘s story, instead of only yourself? What if the point was never to narrate your life perfectly, but to live it honestly?

Maybe the best stories are not about chosen ones at all. Maybe they are about people who showed up anyway. Who stayed kind. Who did not need a hero moment to feel real. The most radical thing you can do in a culture which praises clairity and easy digestability is refuse to be simplified.

There is nothing wrong with wanting your life to feel meaningful. That is human. That is beautiful. The danger lies in mistaking curation for connection, and narrative for truth.

Your life does not have to be perfectly curated or constantly narrated. Sometimes, all you need to do is just…live it. Let it be incoherent. Let it be tender and chaotic and unresolved.

Because maybe the point is not to be the main character.

Maybe the point is to realize there are no main characters. Maybe there never were. Just millions of people, soft and unfinished. Loving badly. Trying gently. Hiding and hoping someone still sees them.

You do not need a plot twist.

You do not need a perfect era.

When you stop performing your life, you start living it.