Esther L (Year 11)

As the growth of TikTok continues, its online culture starts to leak into our lives. One of the most annoying things that continually starts to occur more in my own life is “what about me?” culture or also known as main character syndrome. This can be described as someone who will often only be able to think or talk about themselves.

This stems for the want for individualism, which turns into hyper-individualism. This idea of being a main character started on TikTok, in COVID times when many would pretend to be a main character in a movie in their own head. This then leads to people thinking that things must revolve around themselves. People are unable to think about anything other than themselves. This is fine but it starts to bother people when they need to make it known that they don’t like or relate to something that they are talking about.

 The most well-known example of this being the bean soup video on TikTok. This video was just a simple recipe on how to make bean soup. However, the comments were filled with comments like, “well what if I don’t like bean soup.” “Are there any alternatives to the beans.”. Quick spoiler alert: there is no alternative for beans in a BEAN soup. This video was a very big sign that this is something that occurs in more than a small group of people.

This isn’t the only example of this, there has been multiple occasion where I have seen comments similar to this. I am on a side of tik tok where mums will pack very fancy lunches for there kids, and under a lot of these people will comment “what if my kid is allergic to ____” or “My kid doesn’t like ___”. Maybe just don’t make it then. This is the kind of behaviour that a 10 year old would have, but it becomes a problem when someone over the age of 16 and has enough social awareness to know better does it.

This translates into more things than just food. Someone can talk about how amazing of a day they had online, and the get thousands of replies about how this is wrong and how its ‘insensitive’ to people who had a bad day. I know this sounds like something I made up but it has actually happened multiple times.

The thing is all of these people in replies and comments have the choice to just move on a scroll, there is no need to reply at all its not called for.

To make all these examples seem worse, let me put this into the context of a face to face interaction. This is like walking into a cheesecake shop and then when ordering they loudly state they don’t like cheesecake. Many people who are like this cannot remove themselves out of the forefront of their own minds. This mindset is becoming more and more common and is starting to show in the way people interact in conversation.