main character

in defense of selfies and celebrating your life

Frank Dicksee, The Mirror, 1896

There was a time I judged people for taking solo selfies, especially the ones where they’re standing in front of a bathroom mirror to get their body in the frame and subsequently capture the phone in the picture too. You have to admit there is something funny about taking a selfie in front of a mirror. The symbolism is rife: the double focus on appearance, unabashedly capturing the act within the act, the blatant display of millennial egotism. Maybe because I am a millennial, I held a particularly harsh view of my generation. (Despite taking an abundance of selfies, we are nothing if not self-critical.)

At the end of last year, I attended a salon hosted by my friend Crystal on “main character energy” (recap by Crys here) and noticed that my attitude toward solo selfies has softened. I found myself thinking, there’s nothing wrong with the desire to memorialize who you are today. Vanity and loving yourself are not one and the same. Of course, you are more than your physical appearance, but what’s wrong with celebrating how you look in addition to who you are—the stuff that can’t be captured on camera? Mirror or no mirror, taking a selfie is simply an act of celebrating yourself.

I noticed, too, my gender bias. On dating apps, I was judging men for posting mirror selfies a lot more severely. Most of these are taken at the gym. Presumably they want you to admire the fruits of their bodily labor. But I want to be careful about accusing them of vanity. Can you not express pride in consistently working out and celebrate the outcome of your efforts?

When I dug deeper, I realized that my previous stance against selfies came from a place of self-judgment. Growing up, I was very conscious of not seeming vain or self-centered. It was better to work hard quietly than to be performative about it. I think some cultures emphasize this more than others. But it can be very stifling because where do you draw the line between self-expression and vanity? And what is your life if you can’t celebrate the main character: yourself?

In college, when I came back from a study abroad program in Shanghai, my friends asked, why don’t you have any pictures? I had so many pictures on my phone, but they were all of other people, places, things. It didn’t occur to me to put myself in the frame, to point the camera back at me. When I tried BeReal for the first time last year, it felt very unnatural. I didn’t like the idea of stopping in the middle of a busy street to take a selfie. I was too self-conscious, afraid of how people might label me. There goes another self-absorbed millennial. 

During the winter holidays, I didn’t do anything spectacular—I wasn’t hiking in Fiji or skiing in the Alps—I just went to a few new restaurants I liked and hung out with some friends, and in taking pictures of each event and posting them to my Instagram story, I felt genuinely appreciative of the small things in my life that bring me joy. If I hadn’t done this, I would’ve instantly forgotten what I did that week. It’s like when someone asks, “How was your weekend?” and you draw a blank because so much has already happened in your head since the weekend. My thoughts are racing a hundred miles an hour, usually planning ahead, thinking about a future conversation or event, that I often forget about something that just happened. To really slow down time, you have to smell the roses along the way, and one way to do that is to document and celebrate your life as you go.

Sharing is a key component. I could easily take pictures of what I cooked for dinner or a cool street mural I stumbled upon and forget about it the next day, but when you take the time to post a picture for your friends to react to, you’re seeing your life from a different vantage point, as someone on the outside looking in, and it makes you realize how fun and cool your life is. Everyone who thinks their life is boring doesn’t realize that to other people it looks pretty interesting.

Main character energy is often defined as someone who is making themselves the center of attention. It’s often associated with narcissism. But true main characters, the ones we love in books and movies and TV shows, aren’t trying to make themselves the center of attention: they are the center of attention because we, the audience, care about what happens to them. We care because of our shared humanity: we see a part of ourselves in them, we identify, we relate. Embodying main character energy is about manifesting your truest self. And it involves a certain amount of self-creation and self-expression.

On the other hand, being a narrator is to try to write the script for your life: it’s the desire to control the events of your life so you can tell the story you want to tell. The narrator is often a stand-in for the author. Main characters don’t have a clue what’s going to happen. They have hopes and desires, an idea of the “good,” and in the pursuit of it, all they can do is create something beautiful out of what life throws at them. Part of what I’m trying to do this year is to be at peace with not knowing what the future holds. And the way to do that, I’m beginning to realize, is to truly savor each moment of my life. That is all the little things: new plants that brighten my room, a book I’m reading, a good meal with a friend, and yes, how good I look and feel after the gym.

There’s been too much judgment toward selfie culture, main character energy, and millennial culture at large. A more generous take: selfies are a form of savoring and celebrating the moment—where I am and who I am at this point in time. You can be a citizen of the world while still celebrating selfhood and romanticizing your life. You can care for other people while still caring about how you look. Just because someone loves taking selfies doesn’t mean they are vain or self-centered. Maybe they’re just enjoying their life, and we all should, too.