Casey Moeckel

Let’s talk about Main Character Syndrome. No, not the ha-ha hashtag version. I mean the civilizational diagnosis version. The kind where every app, every ad, every new device, new platform, and algorithm is built to tell you that you are the main story. 

You’ve seen this in action. You like one video about clean eating, and suddenly your feed thinks you’re Gwyneth Paltrow. You’re bombarded with nearly identical videos on the same topic, then stitch videos commenting on an earlier one you watched evangelizing the same point, next are reaction videos of people just watching the same video you already saw and mirroring your reaction back to you.  (Those are the worst of the worst and I will die on this hill.) Now you’ve got ads selling you products to support your microbiome, $20 smoothies, and alkalized water. You watch a clip of someone yelling on a panel show, and now every scroll delivers more moral outrage on the same point you already agreed on twenty-nine likes ago. It’s the snake eating its own tail.

None of that is an accident. None of that is magic. It’s the algorithm doing exactly what it was designed to do: feed you more of what you’ve already shown interest in. It doesn’t care if it’s true. It doesn’t care if it’s good for your mental health or society or your wallet. It cares if you’ll stay. 

Click. Scroll. React. Repeat.

And because you’re human (oh, and we humans looooove to be right) it creates a self-reinforcing loop. You engage with what feels familiar. The algorithm shows you more of it. You engage again. And before long, your entire digital world reflects only your preferences, your fears, your beliefs. You are now the center of a reality that increasingly looks like you, agrees with you, and flatters your perspective. Because your perspective is the best one, right? 

This is confirmation bias at scale, monetized.

This is Main Character Syndrome, weaponized for profit. Remember: on social media, you are always the product.

But here’s another painful, inconvenient truth: If you’re always the main character, you start to believe no one else matters as much as you. And that’s not just narcissism. That’s cultural decay.

We didn’t end up here by chance. 

For decades, we’ve watched as arts education has been pushed to the margins of public life. We’ve gutted humanities departments and allowed the arts to be mocked as a silly side hobby, not something for serious people. Insecure personalities have labeled art as being “weird” or “elite” or “only for snobs”, rather than what it is – a language shared by all of humanity. Budget cuts always seem to come for music, theater, design, and literature first because they’ve been deemed “non-essential.”  Translation: non-essential for profits. Who typically gets targeted during layoffs right after HR? Writers, designers, editors, and creative marketers. 

So what does that say about us when we stop valuing art and replace it with an idolatry of money?

“In my experience, you will truly serve only what you love because service is love made visible. If you love your friends, you will serve your friends. If you love community, you will serve your community. If you love money, you will serve your money. And if you love only yourself you will serve only yourself and you will have only yourself.” ― Stephen Colbert

We need science, math, engineering, analytics, and business. Of course we do! But we also need art – that messy, soul-expanding, unquantifiable, abstract thing – because it makes life worth living. 

Art also, perhaps most importantly, plucks us out of the center and drops us into the audience. Art—real art— teaches us to listen and see that we are not the only story in this world. That someone else’s pain matters, even if it doesn’t look like ours. It reminds us that, while we are special to those who love us, we are not the MOST SPECIAL in the entire history of the universe. Nobody is! Acknowledging and accepting that can be uncomfortable, sure, but it’s also a good thing. 

In short: art builds empathy. It’s exposure therapy for the ego. 

We also need art as a discipline because it helps foster creativity, further innovation, increase communication, build understanding, and expand our way of looking at the world so that we can imagine a different future.

Put it another way: art kindles hope.

And when we remove access to art—when schools become test prep factories and higher ed becomes a strip mine for private equity and tech giants — we don’t just lose artists. We lose something that is irreplaceable within ourselves. 

Art doesn’t fit onto a spreadsheet and its effects can’t be parsed neatly into a report on impact metrics. That can be frustrating to a world that elevates KPIs and A/B testing for performance optimization.

But you can’t measure the joy elicited by a beautiful melody or the feeling you get looking at a painting, watching a film, or reading a book that changes you.

This disintegration of shared cultural space isn’t accidental. It’s a feature, not a bug. Because the less we care about each other, the easier we are to exploit. Empathy is inconvenient for the powerful. It slows down profit. It demands justice. It asks questions that can’t be answered in quarterly earnings reports. 

“When our eyes are graced with wonder, the world reveals its wonders to us. There are people who see only dullness in the world and that is because their eyes have already been dulled. So much depends on how we look at things. The quality of our looking determines what we come to see.” ― John O’Donohue, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace

When we lose art, we also lose the tension and the simple discomfort of difference. In digital spaces designed to affirm rather than challenge us, our culture gets flattened. We lose collective touchtones, while the niche becomes an echo chamber. Worst of all, individual expression gets mistaken for community. 

Cyberethnographer (and adjunct professor of Design and Media Studies at my alma mater, NYU) Ruby Thelot has spoken very elegantly about this. He calls it a form of cultural impoverishment, where everything becomes self-optimization; meanwhile, our culture becomes a fleeting performance instead of shared foundation. 

During the Gilded Age (a time not exactly known for humility) America’s wealthiest industrialists still recognized the value of cultural legacy. Andrew Carnegie, despite being a steel magnate and unapologetic capitalist, founded Carnegie Hall and the Carnegie Museums to make art and music accessible to the public. Henry Clay Frick, despite his reputation for harsh labor practices, built one of the finest private art collections in the world which is now housed in the Frick Collection. And J.P. Morgan, an undisputed titan of finance, amassed a library so vast and significant it became the Morgan Library & Museum. These men were robber barons, yes, but they understood that culture was a form of capital, too. They knew that a society needed more than just industry to thrive.

So what the Hell happened?

Today’s billionaire class (many of them tech elite) have seemingly opted out of art. They don’t fund culture; they gamify it. They don’t stop to ask, “What does this say about who we are?”or “What are the possible consequences?”. They ask, “How fast can we scale it?”

And, so, we now live in a world where, at any moment, we can binge-watch content that never contradicts us. We can plug into VR universes where we’re always the hero. We can immerse ourselves in hyper-personalized “story worlds” where we are the main character.

And yet, despite having all of this at our fingertips, we’ve never felt more alone.  We’ve forgotten that shared culture requires an audience, not just a device and an interface.

That’s why none of this is art; it’s self-medicating with a smartphone. 

The proliferation of Main Character Syndrome is what happens when we stop teaching people how to care someone besides themselves. It’s what happens when art becomes optional and storytelling becomes “content.”

What we are now witnessing is the result of a society that has stopped cultivating curiosity and started selling solipsism as self-care.

“Move fast and break things” may be the motto of the tech world, but I think what we’re breaking is ourselves. Without art that challenges, confronts, and decenters us, we don’t build empathy. We don’t build a shared culture and we don’t build audiences or, by extension, communities. 

Instead, we’re simply livestreaming our own loneliness.

We need to fund the arts. We need to stop dismissing the role they play in our lives, no matter one’s chosen career field. You want to live in a world without design, music, painting, literature, movies, storytelling, or beauty? I certainly don’t. That’s why we need to rebuild an educational system that values art, culture, and creativity and shift away from one that devalues them. Because a society that constantly puts every individual at the center of their own little world eventually forgets how to connect. And connection isn’t a luxury: it’s fundamental to our humanity.