Opinion

We’re living in the era of ‘main character syndrome’. But what if we’re just not that important? | Róisín Lanigan

Published 3 hours ago iNFO Vi3h ago

Jemima Kirke might be best known for her roles in Sex Education and Girls, but those who really have their finger on the pulse know her best work is not done on screen but rather on Instagram, where she performs as a sometime agony aunt for her 630,000 followers. Occasionally, Kirke will dispense esoteric advice on her platform, billing it as “free therapy, ask me anything” – on everything from open relationships (“too many serious conversations”) to being the cool girl (“completely ignore your needs, boundaries and intuition”).

One nugget of wisdom in particular has resonated for me: in November 2022, asked for advice for “unconfident young women”, Kirke uploaded an expressionless selfie with the caption, “I think you guys might be thinking about yourselves too much.”

Years of self-help books and thousands of pounds’ worth of therapy wish they could do what Kirke did in one Instagram story. If it didn’t make me look more self-interested than I’d like to appear, I would genuinely have it framed in my flat. She is right. Nobody has ever been more right, in fact. As someone who often goes through the insecurity spirals, the overthinking, the self-isolation and the worry and the panic of doing all the right things, I am enticed by the idea that all this thought work may not be that worthy – it may just translate into us thinking about ourselves far too much.

Kirke’s motto resonated with young women enough that it has become a meme, frequently reappearing on X when someone is too obviously positioning themselves at the centre of the narrative – a refreshing subversion of what it’s like to live in the main-character-syndrome age. If modern life had an ethos, it would be that the best thing we can do – the way we can achieve nirvana and self-actualisation – is through the noble pursuit of Knowing Ourselves.

Just look at the self-help slogans and books we lean on that centre themselves on this: Nicole LePera’s How To Meet Your Self, a self-help book that sold more than 1 million copies; the rise of shows such as Couples Therapy, the encouragement to know and understand our love languages and attachment styles – not to understand others, but to understand how we might like to be loved by others instead. Take RuPaul’s oft-quoted millennial mantra: “If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else”, which, while well meaning, has become twisted into twin pillars of thought that say loving yourself is more important than genuine connection with others and, arguably worse, that if you don’t have a partner, it’s your own fault for not loving yourself enough.

Therapy culture has done many good things for the world (if you don’t believe me, ask your dad when the last time he cried was). But it’s not a cardinal sin to question the end goal of this monetised, individualised cult of knowing ourselves. Is there a strength to having an unknowable self, of thinking about ourselves less? If the alternative is the narcissism of analysing ourselves in perpetuity, I am inclined to agree with Kirke. When we boil it down, really, what is the point in making self-awareness a virtue above all else?

The ability to sit around and think about ourselves, to lean into that kind of solipsism, is one of the most obvious privileges of modern life. We can be as curious and “do as much of the work” as we want, provided we have the time and, more crucially, the money to do so. The Celebrity Memoir Bookclub podcast in August spoke about the artist Anna Marie Tendler’s eagerly awaited memoir, Men Have Called Her Crazy, and pointed out how “a lot of this book is about how much she thinks about herself”, and posits that if she had less time to do so, perhaps by working, it would not be a bad thing. “Maybe Jemima Kirke was right,” says one of its top comments.

“How can a man know himself? He is a dark and veiled thing,” asked Nietzsche, as he neared his 30th birthday. In an essay about self-discovery, he prioritised 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 said. In other words, it’s how we treat other people and how we interact with them that matters just as much, if not more, than how well we feel we know ourselves.

Of course, there are caveats. Self-knowledge often lends itself to greater empathy and being more considerate of others. Its limit, however, comes when we stop seeing ourselves as equal to others and instead as the most important obsession in our own lives, interacting with everyone else with the sole motive being how it reflects back on ourselves. If Nietzsche doesn’t convince you, consider this sobering fact: the worst person you know may just be in therapy right now, being told they’re good enough and that maintaining boundaries is necessary for growth. And we all know how that went for Jonah Hill.