idle gaze 015: main character energy fuels everything.
Vibes and romanticized everyday moments, everywhere.
“You have to start romanticizing your life” a voice track commonly used on TikTok commands. “You have to start thinking about yourself as the main character.” Main character energy is about feeling like you’re playing the leading role in your own film, no matter what the situation is. At your desk, staring out of the window. A walk home on an empty backstreet. When you view yourself as the main character in the narrative of your life, these are all scenes that can be injected with infinite meaning and limitless emotion.
Main character energy has become an increasingly dominant attitude that influences how we think, behave and express ourselves. It’s become a way to appreciate everyday moments, after a year where we have been forced to learn to cherish the small things.
Main character energy is fuelled by “vibes”. Social media algorithms are prioritizing mundane domestic situations turned into visual poetry. Usually soundtracked by the dreamy soundscape of tracks like Frank Ocean’s Ivy or Bicep’s Glue. Kyle Chayka at The New Yorker observed the brief flashes of seemingly normal life compressed into hypnotic videos found on TikTok as “vibes”. And the more you watch them, the more you start to experience your own life as a string of dreamy narratives:
After absorbing a dozen such videos at a stretch, I look up from my phone and my own apartment glows with that same kind of concentrated attention, as if I were seeing it in montage, too. The objects around me are lambent with significance. I can take in the vibe of my home office: hibiscus tree, hardwood desk, noise-cancelling headphones, sixties-jazz trio, to-go coffee cup. I suddenly feel a little more at home, as if the space belonged to me in a new way, or I had found my place within it as another element of the over-all vibe, playing my part. The vibes are all around us, for the taking.
Main character energy is shaping how we express ourselves. With main character energy, the 140 characters of an Instagram bio are criminally diminutive. Instead, showing an insight into your mundane everyday is worth a thousand words. Which is why intimate but unglamorous interior life exposés like toothbrush selfies have become a thing.
And instead of melting into a sea of generic Tinder profiles with inflated statements and meaningless tropes, dating apps like Feels allow it’s users to express themselves as unique main characters in their own narrative (“Jump into anyone's universe with our coooool immersive discovery! No swipes, good vibes!..you can show who you really are with our coooool profiles full of creativity & personality!”).
With main character energy anyone can sell a personal brand. When you think of yourself as a main character, you think of your experiences as the plot of a story. A failure is just the focus of one chapter, by the end of the next chapter you’ve emerged better and stronger. Flaws are not failures. They become your defining characteristics. Mess-ups can be turned into a line of merch. That’s main character energy epitomized. That’s what happened with Bon Apetit chef Molly Baz. With Molly it started in 2018 with a Youtube video. Baz’s husband had gifted her a pair of Nike sneakers customized with “Cae Sal”, a misspelled abbreviation of her favourite dish —the caesar salad. Cue 2020 and “Cae Sal” has transformed into a collection of merchandise dubbed “Molly Merch”, featuring items like a white pocket T-shirt and baseball cap featuring “Cae Sal” printed in cobalt blue.
Whether it’s adding a melancholic Sufjan Stevens track to a video of your morning ritual, or creating your own line of merch on Fanjoy, many view main character energy as a narcissistic pursuit – but really it’s a universal byproduct of our imagination, as we dream, aspire, mourn and remember. It’s the most human form of energy we have.