Main Character Syndrome is taking over the lives of some in today’s society.
Anna Gotlib, associate professor of philosophy at Brooklyn College City University of New York, determine why this can be dangerous.
Anna Gotlib is an associate professor of philosophy at Brooklyn College CUNY, specializing in feminist bioethics/medical ethics, moral psychology, and philosophy of law. She received her PhD in philosophy from Michigan State University and a JD from Cornell Law School. Anna is the editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics (IJFAB).
Her work has appeared in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, Journal of Medical Humanities, Hypatia, Teaching Philosophy, Aeon/Psyche, and other journals and refereed collections. She also edited two volumes on moral psychology for Rowman and Littlefield International—The Moral Psychology of Sadness (2017) and The Moral Psychology of Regret (2019). In addition, she edited a collection addressing the pandemic, Responses to a Pandemic: Philosophical and Political Reflections (Rowman and Littlefield 2022), as well as a co-edited book on the feminist and sociopolitical implications of the Barbie phenomena entitled, In a Barbie World: Barbie as Narrative, Symbol, and Cipher (Routledge, 2025). Anna is also a co-editor of a book on migration, health, and justice, entitled Forced Migration and Health Justice (Oxford University Press 2025). Currently, she is working on a monograph on identity, memory, and trauma, entitled Broken Stories: Trauma, Memory, Nostalgia (Oxford University Press, 2026).
She recently served as a Fulbright Specialist Scholar at the University of Iceland, and is a part of a multinational team of scholars which received the Ethics in Motion: Feminist Ethics and #MeToo (EMFEM) grant from the Icelandic Research Fund. In the coming year, she is beginning work on a book for more general audiences that is motivated by her Aeon essay on main character syndrome, which she discusses in this program.
Main Character Syndrome
Loneliness and isolation seem to be among our most persistent, and challenging, epidemics. Instead of working to find commonalities and to create shared moral spaces, too many in our social media-obsessed world have exchanged the possibility of relationality and interdependence for their opposite: the deeply individualistic, ego-driven solipsism of “Main Character Syndrome.” Not a clinical diagnosis but more a way of locating oneself in relation to others, MCS is a tendency to view one’s life as a story in which one stars in the central role, with everyone else a side character at best. Main characters act while everyone else reacts. Main characters demand attention and the rest of us had better obey. And it is MCS through which too many make liminal the humanity, including the emotional states, identities, and needs, of others. I argue that this solipsistic turn is not only damaging to our relationships with others, but that it is also detrimental to our own sense of ourselves, and to our ideas about what matters personally, socially, and politically. In fact, the main character narrative is so destructive to views of persons as profoundly relational and interdependent as to pose a threat to two fundamental experiences of being human: the first is connection to others; the second is love. The main character narrative denies the possibilities of both.
My research is not a simple case of generational misalignment, where the older generations are misunderstanding and unfairly stereotyping the younger. Instead, MCS is dangerous precisely because it seems to be no passing fad, with its influence extending far beyond TikTok, to business, academia, and to the halls of power. Perhaps in this self-drenched world, we can reverse course by heeding the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s call to regard each other with care and wonder–and to once again find that which brings us closer together as vulnerable, interdependent selves.
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