The thing about digital cameras—the physical kind, the ones that are everywhere again because nostalgia for the 2000s is now viable, and we are growing collectively sick of the iPhone camera—is that someone has to go through the photos afterward. Several of my friends have recently acquired such cameras, and the morning after a party or dinner, they send around the photos where each person looks luminous, happy, alive.

But there is also a quiet mercy in this exchange: they withhold the ones where you look drunk, caught off guard, or your face is screwed up mid-conversation. Those unfortunate distillations of yourself that are still you, but better not used as visual evidence of “Here, this is what you look like.”

It's a small courtesy, one that feels distinctly feminine: the quiet understanding that to send someone a bad photo of themselves is a minor act of violence. We've all had that moment: opening an image and feeling the stomach-drop of recognition. It's not just embarrassment, but a kind of existential panic, like being confronted with an unauthorized version of yourself. To withhold such images is a sort of kindness, but also a form of complicity. We all understand the particular horror of seeing a photo where you look wrong, where you realize, however briefly, that the version of yourself you perform so carefully might not, in fact, be the one the world receives.

Twenty years ago this might have been a non-issue. You wouldn’t have seen the photo for weeks, if ever, and by then you’d have moved on to other anxieties. Now we see ourselves constantly, in almost real-time, which means we’re in a constant state of response to our own image. The loop has tightened; the feedback is immediate. And immediate feedback, as anyone who’s ever refreshed their inbox compulsively knows, is its own kind of addiction.

I was talking to my friend about it as she sent me photos from last night (but only the ones where I looked good). We agreed it isn’t vanity exactly, but vigilance. The awareness of how one appears has become second nature—less an affectation than a reflex. We've internalized the external gaze so completely that we anticipate the camera before it's raised. This is sort of what people are getting at when they talk about living in a surveillance state, except the surveillance is mutual, voluntary, and weirdly pleasurable until suddenly it isn't.

---

Every culture produces its drug, and ours is self-consciousness. It works the same way any narcotic does: by soothing. The more we monitor how we’re seen, the less we have to feel the ungovernable strangeness of being. But like any narcotic, it’s hard to tell when the relief ends and the craving begins—when you stop performing for others and start performing just to keep the feeling going.

There’s a certain relief in seeing yourself reflected back exactly as you intended, as though coherence were proof of existence. You start to chase the feeling. You adjust, refine, reframe. The self becomes a composition in progress, edited for how it will be received. And the better you get at performing it, the more the performance begins to feel like life itself.

There’s this interview of David Foster Wallace that I think of often (you’ve probably seen it). Recently, I’ve gotten into what I’m sure is an annoying habit of reading things to my friends over the phone—my own writing, bits from my Notes app, things I want someone to find as profound as I do. I wrote down a quote from this interview verbatim and have already recited it to three people (I pause at the end and say “Isn’t that amazing?” and they mutter polite enthusiasm). And now I will recite it to you:

“Who would say entertainment is bad? But a model of life in which I have a right to be entertained all the time seems to me not a promising one. Part of the allure of drugs and entertainment is escape—from my problems, from my life, from having to be stuck in here. It seems fine over the short haul, but as a way of life it doesn’t work all that well. It’s a pretty natural extension of corporate capitalist logic which is ‘I want to feel exactly the way I want to feel, which is good, for exactly this long, and so I will exchange a certain amount of cash for this substance.’ But it's all, of course, a lie, because the control gradually goes away and it stops being that I want to do it and becomes that I feel I need to do it. And that shift from I want something to I feel I need it is a big one, yes? Most of the problems in my life have to do with my confusing what I want and what I need.”

This is exactly the mechanism at work here. We want to be seen, to be legible, to have our existence confirmed by an affirmative, external source. Who would say that being affirmed is bad? But the problem is that we start to need it. That shift—from want to need—is where dependency kicks in. You wait for the tiny, affirmative signal that says you exist in the way you hoped to. And when it doesn’t come (or when it comes wrong), you feel that small chemical drop in your body that registers rejection before the mind can rationalize it. The wanting becomes needing, and the needing becomes the organizing principle of how you move through the world. You start to perform reflexively, because you've internalized the audience so completely that the difference between living and being seen to live has started to blur.

The fear isn’t only of looking bad. Sometimes it’s worse than that—the fear of not registering at all, of being merely peripheral to the scene you’re in. Both anxieties come from the same place: the need to see yourself confirmed in the eyes of others. You don’t just want to appear, you want to appear in a certain way.

---

What people now call "main character energy" is just the latest aesthetic of this condition: the fantasy of a self so central that nothing spontaneous can betray it. It's not arrogance so much as fear. It’s a way to insist that you are, in fact, the protagonist, because the alternative would be unbearable incidentalness. To be background, to be the person eating salad in the out-of-focus part of someone else's restaurant scene. This is a modern hell.

To live as if you’re being watched, to assign your life a soundtrack, to imagine your gestures contributing to some coherent narrative arc, is both romantic and exhausting. The self becomes not a person but a role, one who is almost always on set with the camera rolling. Even your downtime is performance. Especially your downtime. The studied casualness of your weekend morning routine, the aesthetic of your mental breakdown, the playlist for your commute—all of it part of a larger narrative of self.

I was texting a boy the other day, informing him of whatever mundane thing I was doing, for whatever reason.

This filled me with a sense of dread. Not because I looked bad (I looked fine) but because the request made visible the apparatus of performance. I couldn't just exist in the moment; I had to produce documentation of existing in the moment. And producing that documentation meant staging it, which meant it wasn't really the moment anymore but a representation of the moment—a mutually agreed-upon fiction where the image stands in for intimacy.

The problem isn’t the selfie, but that I immediately knew what was being asked of me, and how to deliver it. And that knowing how to deliver it felt both automatic and kind of nauseating. Like I was very good at something I shouldn’t be good at.

---

The Twitter word of the past several months has been “performative,” usually deployed as an accusation: performative activism, performative reading, performative male. But here’s the thing: we’re all performing all the time [insert your favorite Judith Butler quote, I’m not reading that shit].

There’s a particular species of young man who has emerged recently who is intensely aware of his own performance. He knows he’s being watched, he knows he’s being judged, and he knows exactly how to calibrate his self-presentation to signal the right things: sensitivity without weakness, intellect without pretension, self-awareness without self-obsession. We know the charade—he’s underlining parts of Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva at the café, drinking a matcha lemonade because he doesn’t quite like matcha but likes what it suggests. He has opinions about David Foster Wallace (ones he read on X.com), but he won’t bring Infinite Jest on the train because that would make him look like a performative male reading Infinite Jest.

He wants to appear effortless, like this is the most natural expression of himself, uncurated and unstudied. In fact, he’s performing ease itself: the illusion that he isn’t aware of your gaze. But he is. Intensely.

You can’t perform effortlessness without effort. You can’t perform not-caring without caring a great deal. You start to reveal the edges of the thing you’re trying to pass off as completely natural. It’s the guy who says he’s “really into jazz” and cites Kind of Blue—the one album too canonical to prove anything but your own desire to seem cultured.

Or it’s that photo that circulates every few months of some half-naked man in a windowsill with a coffee mug and a book, captioned: U r not a vibe bro 😆😆. The tragic part isn’t that he’s not a vibe, it’s that he wanted to be. And that wanting, the visible trying, is what makes him the most recognizable of all.

The irony, of course, is that this self-awareness about performance is itself a performance. The person who rolls his eyes at the guy reading Infinite Jest on the train, the person who read it privately, years ago, and can readily expound on the irony of a novel so desperate to be authentic that it collapses under the weight of its own self-awareness—is performing just as much, only in the opposite direction. He’s trading one kind of display (earnest over-identification) for another (ironic distance). The knowingness is its own aesthetic, another way of curating yourself for consumption.

---

This is the loop. You perform to be seen, but being seen makes you aware that you’re performing. So you re-perform—hopefully more effortlessly this time. Maybe the guy who’s “not a vibe” now reads the same book but in a more secluded spot, with a shirt on. Maybe he’s hoping people will now see him and think, That’s an attractive, intellectual guy. He kind of is a vibe. 

Maybe the guy too afraid to read Infinite Jest on the train opts for A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Maybe a girl will see him and think, He’s reading the more niche stuff. He knows what’s up. I wonder what he thought of the essay on David Lynch.

Maybe the guy who wants to be into jazz spends a few weeks going through the Miles Davis discography, maybe he gets really into the Second Great Quintet and starts listening to Wayne Shorter, and then Weather Report, and then he starts to tell people that his favorite album is Heavy Weather. Maybe then people will hear him and think Now that’s a guy who knows jazz.

Maybe this time it’ll look natural. And, of course, it isn’t all performance. He does like David Foster Wallace; he does like jazz. But he wants to be recognized for it; to be seen as the cool, intellectual, nonchalant guy he knows he could be. He wants to be seen, and seen well, like we all do.

It's a practice of self—the choreography of appearing. Each small nod of recognition is a flicker of proof that you exist in the way you hoped to. But the proof fades quickly, so you reach for another. It’s the same logic Wallace described: that slippery shift from wanting to needing. You start by wanting to be understood, but end up needing to be affirmed. The performance becomes the mechanism through which you manage the anxiety of being. It’s how you come to know yourself, by being in front of others.

This is the subtle psychology of the main character: we perform not just to be noticed, but to make ourselves into the kind of person worth noticing. To edit the self until it feels coherent, desirable, real. We want to believe the story we’re telling about ourselves, and we want others to believe it too. When they do—when they like our post, when they laugh at the right moment—it confirms the illusion that the self we’ve constructed is working. That we’re not just visible, but valuable. That we are, in fact, the kind of person we meant to be.

The performative male is only the most obvious expression of this, the one caught in the act of trying. He doesn’t only want to be seen; he wants to be seen in a certain way. To be interesting without effort, self-aware without vanity, singular but never strange. What he wants, what we all want, is to be liked for the very performance we pretend isn’t one. That’s the paradox: the harder you try to appear natural, the more transparent the effort becomes. The desire to be a good main character—to be loved for your own construction—is the thing that gives you away.

The answer isn’t to stop performing (you can’t) but to notice the performance as it’s happening. To recognize that vigilance for what it is: a small, constant effort to be someone, and to like who that person is. Maybe that’s the courtesy my friends perform when they send only the good photos: a gentleness with the gap between who we are and who we hope to be. Maybe the point isn’t to close that gap, but to live inside it a little more calmly.

Every culture produces its drug, and ours is self-consciousness. The question isn’t whether we’re addicted; it’s whether we can live with the addiction without letting it hollow us out. Whether we can stand a little blur, a little bad light, a little contradiction, and still recognize ourselves there.

The thing about digital cameras—the physical kind, the ones that are everywhere again because nostalgia for the 2000s is now viable, and we are growing collectively sick of the iPhone camera—is that someone has to go through the photos afterward. Several of my friends have recently acquired such cameras, and the morning after a party or dinner, they send around the photos where each person looks luminous, happy, alive.

But there is also a quiet mercy in this exchange: they withhold the ones where you look drunk, caught off guard, or your face is screwed up mid-conversation. Those unfortunate distillations of yourself that are still you, but better not used as visual evidence of “Here, this is what you look like.”

It's a small courtesy, one that feels distinctly feminine: the quiet understanding that to send someone a bad photo of themselves is a minor act of violence. We've all had that moment: opening an image and feeling the stomach-drop of recognition. It's not just embarrassment, but a kind of existential panic, like being confronted with an unauthorized version of yourself. To withhold such images is a sort of kindness, but also a form of complicity. We all understand the particular horror of seeing a photo where you look wrong, where you realize, however briefly, that the version of yourself you perform so carefully might not, in fact, be the one the world receives.

Twenty years ago this might have been a non-issue. You wouldn’t have seen the photo for weeks, if ever, and by then you’d have moved on to other anxieties. Now we see ourselves constantly, in almost real-time, which means we’re in a constant state of response to our own image. The loop has tightened; the feedback is immediate. And immediate feedback, as anyone who’s ever refreshed their inbox compulsively knows, is its own kind of addiction.

I was talking to my friend about it as she sent me photos from last night (but only the ones where I looked good). We agreed it isn’t vanity exactly, but vigilance. The awareness of how one appears has become second nature—less an affectation than a reflex. We've internalized the external gaze so completely that we anticipate the camera before it's raised. This is sort of what people are getting at when they talk about living in a surveillance state, except the surveillance is mutual, voluntary, and weirdly pleasurable until suddenly it isn't.

---

Every culture produces its drug, and ours is self-consciousness. It works the same way any narcotic does: by soothing. The more we monitor how we’re seen, the less we have to feel the ungovernable strangeness of being. But like any narcotic, it’s hard to tell when the relief ends and the craving begins—when you stop performing for others and start performing just to keep the feeling going.

There’s a certain relief in seeing yourself reflected back exactly as you intended, as though coherence were proof of existence. You start to chase the feeling. You adjust, refine, reframe. The self becomes a composition in progress, edited for how it will be received. And the better you get at performing it, the more the performance begins to feel like life itself.

There’s this interview of David Foster Wallace that I think of often (you’ve probably seen it). Recently, I’ve gotten into what I’m sure is an annoying habit of reading things to my friends over the phone—my own writing, bits from my Notes app, things I want someone to find as profound as I do. I wrote down a quote from this interview verbatim and have already recited it to three people (I pause at the end and say “Isn’t that amazing?” and they mutter polite enthusiasm). And now I will recite it to you:

“Who would say entertainment is bad? But a model of life in which I have a right to be entertained all the time seems to me not a promising one. Part of the allure of drugs and entertainment is escape—from my problems, from my life, from having to be stuck in here. It seems fine over the short haul, but as a way of life it doesn’t work all that well. It’s a pretty natural extension of corporate capitalist logic which is ‘I want to feel exactly the way I want to feel, which is good, for exactly this long, and so I will exchange a certain amount of cash for this substance.’ But it's all, of course, a lie, because the control gradually goes away and it stops being that I want to do it and becomes that I feel I need to do it. And that shift from I want something to I feel I need it is a big one, yes? Most of the problems in my life have to do with my confusing what I want and what I need.”

This is exactly the mechanism at work here. We want to be seen, to be legible, to have our existence confirmed by an affirmative, external source. Who would say that being affirmed is bad? But the problem is that we start to need it. That shift—from want to need—is where dependency kicks in. You wait for the tiny, affirmative signal that says you exist in the way you hoped to. And when it doesn’t come (or when it comes wrong), you feel that small chemical drop in your body that registers rejection before the mind can rationalize it. The wanting becomes needing, and the needing becomes the organizing principle of how you move through the world. You start to perform reflexively, because you've internalized the audience so completely that the difference between living and being seen to live has started to blur.

The fear isn’t only of looking bad. Sometimes it’s worse than that—the fear of not registering at all, of being merely peripheral to the scene you’re in. Both anxieties come from the same place: the need to see yourself confirmed in the eyes of others. You don’t just want to appear, you want to appear in a certain way.

---

What people now call "main character energy" is just the latest aesthetic of this condition: the fantasy of a self so central that nothing spontaneous can betray it. It's not arrogance so much as fear. It’s a way to insist that you are, in fact, the protagonist, because the alternative would be unbearable incidentalness. To be background, to be the person eating salad in the out-of-focus part of someone else's restaurant scene. This is a modern hell.

To live as if you’re being watched, to assign your life a soundtrack, to imagine your gestures contributing to some coherent narrative arc, is both romantic and exhausting. The self becomes not a person but a role, one who is almost always on set with the camera rolling. Even your downtime is performance. Especially your downtime. The studied casualness of your weekend morning routine, the aesthetic of your mental breakdown, the playlist for your commute—all of it part of a larger narrative of self.

I was texting a boy the other day, informing him of whatever mundane thing I was doing, for whatever reason.

This filled me with a sense of dread. Not because I looked bad (I looked fine) but because the request made visible the apparatus of performance. I couldn't just exist in the moment; I had to produce documentation of existing in the moment. And producing that documentation meant staging it, which meant it wasn't really the moment anymore but a representation of the moment—a mutually agreed-upon fiction where the image stands in for intimacy.

The problem isn’t the selfie, but that I immediately knew what was being asked of me, and how to deliver it. And that knowing how to deliver it felt both automatic and kind of nauseating. Like I was very good at something I shouldn’t be good at.

---

The Twitter word of the past several months has been “performative,” usually deployed as an accusation: performative activism, performative reading, performative male. But here’s the thing: we’re all performing all the time [insert your favorite Judith Butler quote, I’m not reading that shit].

There’s a particular species of young man who has emerged recently who is intensely aware of his own performance. He knows he’s being watched, he knows he’s being judged, and he knows exactly how to calibrate his self-presentation to signal the right things: sensitivity without weakness, intellect without pretension, self-awareness without self-obsession. We know the charade—he’s underlining parts of Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva at the café, drinking a matcha lemonade because he doesn’t quite like matcha but likes what it suggests. He has opinions about David Foster Wallace (ones he read on X.com), but he won’t bring Infinite Jest on the train because that would make him look like a performative male reading Infinite Jest.

He wants to appear effortless, like this is the most natural expression of himself, uncurated and unstudied. In fact, he’s performing ease itself: the illusion that he isn’t aware of your gaze. But he is. Intensely.

You can’t perform effortlessness without effort. You can’t perform not-caring without caring a great deal. You start to reveal the edges of the thing you’re trying to pass off as completely natural. It’s the guy who says he’s “really into jazz” and cites Kind of Blue—the one album too canonical to prove anything but your own desire to seem cultured.

Or it’s that photo that circulates every few months of some half-naked man in a windowsill with a coffee mug and a book, captioned: U r not a vibe bro 😆😆. The tragic part isn’t that he’s not a vibe, it’s that he wanted to be. And that wanting, the visible trying, is what makes him the most recognizable of all.

The irony, of course, is that this self-awareness about performance is itself a performance. The person who rolls his eyes at the guy reading Infinite Jest on the train, the person who read it privately, years ago, and can readily expound on the irony of a novel so desperate to be authentic that it collapses under the weight of its own self-awareness—is performing just as much, only in the opposite direction. He’s trading one kind of display (earnest over-identification) for another (ironic distance). The knowingness is its own aesthetic, another way of curating yourself for consumption.

---

This is the loop. You perform to be seen, but being seen makes you aware that you’re performing. So you re-perform—hopefully more effortlessly this time. Maybe the guy who’s “not a vibe” now reads the same book but in a more secluded spot, with a shirt on. Maybe he’s hoping people will now see him and think, That’s an attractive, intellectual guy. He kind of is a vibe. 

Maybe the guy too afraid to read Infinite Jest on the train opts for A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Maybe a girl will see him and think, He’s reading the more niche stuff. He knows what’s up. I wonder what he thought of the essay on David Lynch.

Maybe the guy who wants to be into jazz spends a few weeks going through the Miles Davis discography, maybe he gets really into the Second Great Quintet and starts listening to Wayne Shorter, and then Weather Report, and then he starts to tell people that his favorite album is Heavy Weather. Maybe then people will hear him and think Now that’s a guy who knows jazz.

Maybe this time it’ll look natural. And, of course, it isn’t all performance. He does like David Foster Wallace; he does like jazz. But he wants to be recognized for it; to be seen as the cool, intellectual, nonchalant guy he knows he could be. He wants to be seen, and seen well, like we all do.

It's a practice of self—the choreography of appearing. Each small nod of recognition is a flicker of proof that you exist in the way you hoped to. But the proof fades quickly, so you reach for another. It’s the same logic Wallace described: that slippery shift from wanting to needing. You start by wanting to be understood, but end up needing to be affirmed. The performance becomes the mechanism through which you manage the anxiety of being. It’s how you come to know yourself, by being in front of others.

This is the subtle psychology of the main character: we perform not just to be noticed, but to make ourselves into the kind of person worth noticing. To edit the self until it feels coherent, desirable, real. We want to believe the story we’re telling about ourselves, and we want others to believe it too. When they do—when they like our post, when they laugh at the right moment—it confirms the illusion that the self we’ve constructed is working. That we’re not just visible, but valuable. That we are, in fact, the kind of person we meant to be.

The performative male is only the most obvious expression of this, the one caught in the act of trying. He doesn’t only want to be seen; he wants to be seen in a certain way. To be interesting without effort, self-aware without vanity, singular but never strange. What he wants, what we all want, is to be liked for the very performance we pretend isn’t one. That’s the paradox: the harder you try to appear natural, the more transparent the effort becomes. The desire to be a good main character—to be loved for your own construction—is the thing that gives you away.

The answer isn’t to stop performing (you can’t) but to notice the performance as it’s happening. To recognize that vigilance for what it is: a small, constant effort to be someone, and to like who that person is. Maybe that’s the courtesy my friends perform when they send only the good photos: a gentleness with the gap between who we are and who we hope to be. Maybe the point isn’t to close that gap, but to live inside it a little more calmly.

Every culture produces its drug, and ours is self-consciousness. The question isn’t whether we’re addicted; it’s whether we can live with the addiction without letting it hollow us out. Whether we can stand a little blur, a little bad light, a little contradiction, and still recognize ourselves there.