Prisoners of our own invention.
Why our made-up personal narratives are blinding us to what really matters.
This continues our investigation into “The Three Truths No One Tells You.” Learn more about the series here.
Truth #1: It’s All Invented
Component 2: You are not the main character in a story about you.
The “main character syndrome” we’ve embraced is a delusion that isolates us and prevents us from living a truly connected, meaningful life.
We’ll explore this concept during a Zoom session on Friday, October 3rd at 1pm EST.
Register here to participate live, or submit your questions here if you can’t attend. All participants will receive a recorded meeting summary and commentary as a complimentary 6-month paid subscription.
“Anyway, that’s enough about me, let’s talk about you. What do YOU think of me?” ~ Bette Midler, Beaches
You know what’s wild? How hard it can be to get people to see something that seems so obvious once you notice it. I’ve been trying to point this out for years, and sometimes I feel like I’m pointing at one of those Magic Eye pictures from the 90s, desperately trying to get people to see the hidden image. “Look, it’s right there! The elephant! Can’t you see it?”
The elephant filling up our entire cultural living room is this: we are obsessed with the stories about ourselves, and it’s killing our capacity for genuine connection, aliveness, and love. Every single day, millions of people wake up utterly convinced they are the starring characters in their own personal dramas, unwittingly casting everyone around them as extras, supporting characters, or antagonists.
And we’ve somehow convinced ourselves this is just how brains work—that it’s natural, even necessary for psychological health. We’ve even dressed it up as empowerment: “Write your own story! You’re the author of your life! Main character energy!” But strip away the rhetoric and what you’re left with is a profound delusion that’s fragmenting our society and leaving us lonely, empty, and anxious.
This central character syndrome shows up everywhere, just in different costumes. Some people cast themselves as heroes on epic journeys of personal triumph. Others go for the victim narrative, finding deep meaning in their suffering. Then you’ve got the martyrs, nobly sacrificing themselves for causes that conveniently place them at the center of cosmic significance. The specific role doesn’t matter—it’s the underlying structure: a story where one person’s perceptions flatten everyone and everything else into instrumental roles or props.
What this does to our daily interactions is heartbreaking. When you’re convinced you’re the central character, other people become functionally invisible as independent beings. That person serving your coffee? They’re not a sensitive, living being carrying their own loves and fears—they’re just a bit player whose only relevance is how well they serve your story. The colleague who disagrees with you isn’t expressing a thoughtful perspective—they’re an antagonist to be overcome.
Look at what this does to how we see entire groups of people. They stop being collections of unique individuals with families and friends. Instead, they become monolithic forces in your personal narrative—the corrupt politicians, the ignorant masses, the evil media, the privileged elites. Millions of people, each with their own fears and hopes, get turned into either supporting characters who validate your worldview or antagonists who threaten it.
This isn’t just selfishness—it’s actually a form of hypnosis, a fundamental cognitive failure. The complete inability to recognize that consciousness and moral worth extend beyond the boundaries of our “tiny skull-sized kingdoms.”1 We’ve normalized what philosophers call lacking a “theory of mind”—typically associated with developmental disorders—as a lifestyle choice.
But here’s what really gets me: central character thinking makes real love impossible. Love requires seeing another person as fully real, beautiful and valuable in themselves—not as supporting cast in your personal drama. Real love wants everything around you to flourish and be fully and uniquely alive: people, creatures, trees, the whole world in all its wild complexity.
But when you’re the star of your own show, everything else becomes a plot device. We stop seeing the actual mystery and magnificence of reality—the way morning light catches in a spider’s web, the particular way your friend laughs when truly delighted, the stubborn persistence of a blade of grass growing through concrete. We tune it all out because it’s inconsequential to the real work of managing our starring role.
The moment someone or something becomes inconvenient, demanding, or simply irrelevant to our narrative arc, they get edited out—unconsciously, automatically. A struggling friend becomes “too much drama.” An aging parent becomes a burden disrupting our story. The natural world becomes scenery we scroll past or modify while crafting our next social media chapter.
The irony is that our obsession with personal narratives actually makes our lives less meaningful, not more. When you’re constantly trying to script your experiences into some coherent storyline, you miss the genuine significance that emerges from simply being present to what’s actually happening.
So what’s the alternative? The answer lies in shifting from story-driven thinking to something more immediate and open. Instead of asking “What happens next in my story?” we can ask “What does this moment reveal about reality?” Instead of “How do I overcome this obstacle?” we can wonder “What is this experience teaching me?”
This shift requires abandoning some comforting illusions—that our lives have plots, that our choices lead toward some meaningful climax, that we are heroes or victims or martyrs. It means recognizing that we are simply conscious beings sharing a brief, strange, and beautiful experience with billions of other conscious beings.
When you begin to diminish your attachment to the narrative sense of self, a different sense of self becomes available. Not the self that needs to prove something or become something, but the self that simply is. When you stop needing to be important, you become available for genuine surprise. When you abandon your starring role, you finally become free to see and respond to what’s actually happening around you.
The world desperately needs people who can think and act beyond the boundaries of their skull-sized kingdoms. Our biggest challenges require collaborative responses that put shared wellbeing ahead of individual storylines. But as long as we remain trapped in central character thinking, we’ll keep trying to solve collective problems through personal preferences and self-interested agendas.
The revolution we need isn’t political or technological—it’s psychological and spiritual. We need the awareness and courage to live without the comfort of believing ourselves to be special or destined for significance. We need to find meaning not in our individual narratives but in our capacity to show up fully for each moment and respond with whatever passion, wisdom and compassion we can muster.
The stories we tell ourselves—the relentless internal narratives that loop through our minds—aren’t harmless entertainment. They’re prison cells we’ve constructed from our own desperate need to matter. But the door has always been unlocked. We just have to be willing to walk out of our starring roles and into the much more interesting experience of being fully, authentically, courageously human.
Trust me, once you see the elephant in the Magic Eye picture, you can’t unsee it. And that’s exactly what we need.
Stay passionate!
From David Foster Wallace’s famous 2005 Kenyon College commencement speech, “This is Water.” And here’s a great piece about what Wallace tried to warn us about.