Some People Genuinely Believe We’re All Extras, and Their Main Character Syndrome Is the Evidence

The customer service material is the purest strain, because retail is where entitlement gets tested against actual locked doors. There’s a story about someone arriving after closing and yanking on the entrance in fury, operating on the belief that posted business hours are a soft suggestion and her personal schedule is federal law. There’s a review from someone genuinely upset that a mattress store, whose entire business model is selling mattresses, would not also perform a free moving service, two years after the purchase. Sir, the grocery store also declines to come cook the food. That’s not a service gap. That’s a boundary, and you’ve discovered it.

Then the public space invasions, which is where main character syndrome becomes a physical structure. There’s a beach photo where one family erected a canopy occupying what appears to be an acre of prime sand, manifest destiny with a cooler. There’s a plane where someone’s bare feet have entered a stranger’s seat area, an act so bold it suggests the perpetrator genuinely believes the aircraft is theirs and the rest of us are guests. And there’s a woman posing dramatically on a parked motorcycle in what is clearly a fast food parking lot, living inside a film that only she can see, and honestly, that one’s harmless, I hope the exhaust pipe was cool, I hope she got the shot.

And then the interpersonal demands, where the damage lands on people who actually know them. There’s a bridal party rule sheet requiring a five-thousand-dollar buy-in from friends, with restrictions on food and dancing, which converts a wedding into a paid subscription with poor benefits. There’s a text complaining that someone else dared to have a birthday cake in the same general timeframe. And there’s the fridge whiteboard where a grown adult has documented his inability to perform basic household tasks, which we all recognize as weaponized incompetence, and which everyone in his house is presumably too exhausted to litigate. Dylan is not unable. Dylan has simply learned that “unable” works, and nobody has corrected him.

Here’s what I actually find interesting about all of these: not one of these people thinks they’re the villain. The canopy family thinks they planned ahead. The bride thinks she’s organized. Dylan genuinely believes he’s bad at laundry. Main character syndrome isn’t malice, it’s a blind spot, a total inability to run the mental simulation where you’re the inconvenience in someone else’s day. That simulation is basically what manners are, and some people never installed it.

And the reason we love reading these is that it’s the cheapest possible self-check available. You look at the person yanking a locked door, you feel superior for a second, and then a small quiet voice asks whether you’ve ever done a smaller version of that, and the honest answer is yes, obviously, everyone has. That’s the actual value here. Not the roast. The recalibration. Now go apologize to whoever you were slightly insufferable to this week. It was probably a service worker. It’s always a service worker.

The extras have opinions. The doors are locked at nine. Check your simulation.