I asked my students about ‘main character energy.’ The answers surprised me | Opinion

In the waning days of the school year, I learned that people much younger than I live in a world coursing with something called Main character energy. I’d never heard of this, so I wanted to know more.

I soon learned enough to survey my eighth graders about main character energy and whether they wanted it. Generally, main character energy describes someone who lives as though they’re the central character in a movie or book.

I found that the breathless anxiety about the social media-fueled self-indulgence of young people may be, if not overheated, at least more complicated than we want to recognize. Cultural change usually is, after all.

Of the 68 respondents to my survey, 85% had heard of main character energy, though a small portion of this group said they had heard of the term but didn’t understand it. Of those 85%, I asked whether main character energy is good or bad, and a most elegant bell curve resulted, with over half landing on neutral and equal numbers on either side.

Next, I asked my students to read one thing about main character energy — anything of their choosing — and then respond to the survey. This time, the neutral mean shrank by almost 15%, and the bad outweighed the good 34% to 23%.

Critics and analysts seem to take one of two competing positions on main character energy. Pundits worried about our moral and intellectual future tend to believe it reflects the destructive self-indulgence that erodes our society’s argument. If you take a psychology perspective, however, you are more likely to emphasize the ways main character energy supports well-being and mental health by establishing and bolstering our sense of autonomy and value.

And sometimes, of course, analysts find and use data to emphasize the point they intended to make before they even start their evaluation. Admittedly, I hoped to do this with my survey results. I was confident that pandemic-interrupted schooling changed both students and school itself, and I expected my respondents to say things that would support the lament I envisioned regarding how much youngsters are lost in the digital wasteland.

Unfortunately, what they told me was more complicated, and the complexity showed most fully in the responses to the final question on the survey: whether they wanted to have main character energy.

Sure, a couple of respondents were brazen enough to say something as direct as, “I already have it.” But more of the “Yes” responses hedged, saying things like, “Yeah, maybe a little but not (so much) that I’m overdoing it.” Or, “Maybe sometimes I’d want to have it, but not all the time.”

Of the roughly 60 students who actually took a position, only 16 answered with some degree of affirmation that they’d like to have main character.

All in all, it wasn’t the self-absorption I expected to hear. But one answer particularly intrigued me. A student said, “No, I want Likable Sidekick Character Energy.” This response evokes what really matters in life — for individuals, for organizations and for societies.

Sure, the flashy attention-seeking leaders get more notice and glory (if it’s available), but everybody who has ever lived or worked with people knows that sidekicks (or followers, or worker bees, or whatever you want to call them) are essential for the effective functioning of every social organism you can think of.

And all of this made me reconsider a particular situation we had at my middle school this year.

In March, a student — or several students — created Instagram accounts in my name, borrowing pictures they found on the web of me and my sons, using them to create spurious profile photos and “posts.” They wrote a bio ostensibly about me, using foul racial and coarse sexual content. (I’m white and my adopted sons are Black.)

The individuals my administrators and I suspect made or spread these pages clearly seemed like the type who wanted or thrived on main character energy. They were routinely laughing with other students about something on their phones; constantly calling across rooms and halls to claim the attention of other “cool kids;” and maintaining significant profiles and presence on social media.

Likewise, the students who I could see were “following” these pages constituted another branch of the cool kids’ family tree, and when I asked them why they were following, they simply said, “I just thought the pictures were funny.”

I suspect these “funny” antics were intended to get a response from others in the main-character-energy-relevant set, with much less regard for the collateral and very uncool effects on people around them.

Apparently, main character energy need not worry about whom it burns, as long as it delivers an entertainingly pleasant shock to fellow insiders and followers.

But the survey indicates that this less-than-prosocial behavior arises in a minority of the student population. In this way, the results confirm what I already knew, really. My principal let me address the whole eighth grade, and students and adults alike poured out oceans of encouragement and support on me. Similarly, when a former student of mine — now a ninth grader — heard what happened, she painted a tree with an inscription reading, “You really ‘leafed’ your mark on us” and got about 40 of her colleagues to sign it. The staff of the student newspaper at the same high school also published a long article sympathizing with me over what had happened.

Obviously, school has always had cool kids, but before social media, main character energy activities (or whatever the equivalent was at the time) were more publicly observable by adults. That had something of a constraining effect. Ultimately, getting access to the adult world required you to embrace the parameters of that world. In short, you had to grow up.

Social media, by contrast, can reinforce the less-than-mature pursuit of cool. It allows, for instance, students to watch “chicken fights” and chortle about how cool it is. Students were surprised when I informed them the fighters are illegal, which is the only way I would ever have heard such activities presented when I was a teen.

In other words, when I was young, the adults in the room were always establishing the contextual framing of how things were. Today, social media allows everything to be self-referential, in every sense of the word. Who needs the adults’ rules when social media is feeding and reinforcing cool constantly enough to keep me happy and entertained?

So here lies the real concern: Will the advent of social media upend the normal maturation process, somehow sustaining the tropes of cool beyond their traditional social limits?

Like so much technological and cultural change throughout history, social media will affect how people interact, with perhaps particular consequences for teenagers and young adults. But the core of the problem isn’t social media. Rather, it’s the longstanding difficulty that human societies have always faced — how to bring younger people into the life of the community in ways that enable them to thrive as individuals and the community to sustain itself as a social organism.

This has always been a complicated task, and social media may have added to that complexity. But a lot of the kids are alright, mostly, while this challenge remains: How to cultivate more of that ‘alrightness’ in more young people and help them grow into vital and vibrant adults.

Cultivating “Likable Sidekick Character Energy” would be a good start.

Andrew Milton teaches eighth Grade English in DuPont.