Being the main character made me sick. Rage healed me.

Social media burnout can take a physical toll - physicians and philosophers agree.

Many little girls dream of fame and I was no exception. I dreamt of being admired by hordes of fans, lavished with love, praise and validation. Becoming an actress seemed like the most straightforward route toward fame, so when drama class unearthed my lack of talent, I was understandably devastated.

But it turns out I was worried for nothing. You used to need acting skills, grit and auditions to become the main character. Now, all it takes is WiFi.

I first encountered the concept of main character energy during the early days of the pandemic. The video shook me out of my doomscrolling trance.

“Romanticise your life,” a woman whispered through my headphones, “pretend you’re the main character of a movie, even if it’s just a rainy Tuesday and you’re sat in bed in your pyjamas.” It was. I was.

The algorithm quickly understood that my appetite for these videos was bottomless. Swipe after swipe, disembodied female voices nourished my soul. As they arranged hydrangea bouquets, whipped up dalgona coffee and journaled in neat cursive, my greasy ponytail bobbed up and down with approval.

Thus, from a rented room in central London, my main character journey began. I bought a £20 dracaena plant and hung paintings on my bare walls. I weeded the garden in a flowing skirt, listening to movie soundtracks. I bought a ring for every finger and watched in awe as they sparkled over my keyboard. I’m still wearing them as I write this essay.

For a while, romanticising my life felt genuinely empowering. It gave meaning to the pandemic’s surreal shapelessness. Life felt lacking in plot, but I could impose one like an indie film director. No one was there to bear witness to me in real life, but I could turn to online spectators instead.

So I did. Having quit social media in 2018, after building a relatively large audience, I returned in full force during lockdown. “Romanticise your life,” I spread the gospel. “You are the main character.” The movement had found a faithful disciple in me.

As a main character evangelist, I no longer simply drank coffee. I turned each beverage into an artwork. I drank it in the most aesthetically pleasing part of my home - a terrace with a view of the Shard that blessed the top of my otherwise shabby, mouse-infested house share. I dressed up before allowing myself to enjoy the beverage, and filmed myself in the act.

Later, while editing the footage, I often berated myself for my aesthetic failings. My lattes were murky, and my hair uncooperative. I rarely got up in time to capture the morning sun at its peak goldenness. I never got my angles quite right.

Then something else happened, something I thought unrelated. I got sick. My skin broke out in a rash, a small patch of scaly skin in the fold of my right arm. I thought nothing of it until the welts began to spread. Soon my entire body was oozing, weeping and rebelling.

This is the story of my main character syndrome, burnout and recovery, and the lessons I learnt along the way.

Curate me pretty

Becoming a main character worthy of admiration requires a hefty dose of self-surveillance. This is, after all, the role of our lives. We want to make sure we play it well.

Online, we carefully curate our finest moments. We filter. We edit. We agonise. We become the actor, director and publicist of our one-person show. But the performance starts offline, in the real world.

Girls and women are particularly susceptible to self-surveillance because we learn it from an early age. Commenting on girls’ looks is so commonplace that we barely notice it. “What a beautiful little girl.” “You look so pretty in that dress.” “She’ll be a heartbreaker when she’s older.” True or not, praising a female child’s beauty is considered kind. It is our society’s go-to compliment.

In her book, Beauty Sick: How the Cultural Obsession with Appearance Hurts Girls and Women, psychologist Dr Renee Engeln writes: “If other people are always monitoring your appearance, eventually you’ll start doing the work for them. You become the closest observer of how you look, a constant surveyor of your own body.”

I remember internally squirming at compliments about my body as a child. But I never shared this discomfort with anyone and learnt to accept them with a smile. Impoliteness was ugly on a girl, I’d been told, and ugly was a terrible thing. Ugly got you taunts, beauty got you praise. I desperately wanted praise.

As Dr Engeln puts it, “we have gone from a culture that reminds you that your body is being looked at to your being the most consistent surveyor of your own body.”

But I’d argue that self-surveillance in the digital age extends far beyond our bodies. We assess the aesthetics of our homes, our partners, even our children, before sharing them online. The longer we spend on social media, the more we internalise its aesthetics and the more we shape our whole lives to fit them.

Turn on, tune in, burnout

Living up to the aesthetic standards set by social media is virtually impossible. A select few come close, through a combination of wealth, inherited good looks and hired help. But even these statistical anomalies occasionally get diarrhoea and, I assure you, no one looks aspirational while sweating on the toilet.

Despite this literal impossibility, many of us - myself included - take our failed attempts at perfection personally. Over time, the stress of this takes a toll. In The Burnout Report 2025, conducted by Mental Health UK, 91% of respondents experienced “high or extreme levels of pressure or stress” - conditions whose long-term presence often leads to burnout.

Matters are even worse amongst those of us who live and breathe social media - in a 2022 study, 90% of surveyed content creators had experienced burnout.

Burnout may sound like the poetic consequence of daring to burn brightly. The word speaks of fire turned to ashes, the flickering of a once-bright flame. But burnout isn’t a meditative breath we draw before striking a fresh match. Burnout often means the complete erosion of our identities.

Philosopher Byung-Chul Han gained widespread notoriety for his 2015 book The Burnout Society. I read it in a single sitting, my brain convulsing with each page. This wasn’t a fun read for me. The needlessly abstract language, the dismissive tone, the occasionally erroneous sweeping statements - there’s a lot about the book I dislike. But its central argument is compelling.

“Depression is creative fatigue and exhausted ability,” Han writes. “The complaint of the depressive individual, “Nothing is possible,” can only occur in a society that thinks, “Nothing is impossible.” No-longer-being-able-to-be-able leads to destructive self-reproach and auto-aggression.”

Han believes - and I agree - that our achievement-oriented society has turned us into egoistic entrepreneurs. As main characters, we continuously optimise ourselves for achievement. In a society where “nothing is impossible”, there’s no limit to our potential, only the shame of not reaching it.

Failure feels personal because we are both boss and employee, director and main character. Our hyper-individualistic culture breeds narcissism, and we’re paying the price.

As sociologist Richard Sennett writes: “Narcissism is the very opposite of strong self-love. Self-absorption does not produce gratification, it produces injury to the self; erasing the line between self and other means that nothing new, nothing “other”, ever enters the self; it is devoured and transformed until one thinks one can see oneself in the other - and then it becomes meaningless.”

This self-absorption hampers our ability to relate to one another. Unless a person can directly benefit our main character performance, we struggle to justify fitting them into our busy lives.

In place of face-to-face human connection, we turn to social media, which can accommodate our erratic schedules better than our equally busy human counterparts. During our precious downtime, we consume and consume and consume, until we give ourselves a bellyache.

When consumption consumes

This bellyache is often literal. Burnout can manifest physically as anxiety, insomnia, irritable bowel syndrome and autoimmune flare-ups. In my case, it showed up as full-body atopic eczema.

Before proceeding, I want to make it clear that this essay isn’t an attempt to disparage modern medicine. I’m grateful to be alive at a time of radical scientific advancement. I’m not here to extoll the benefits of raw milk, disparage vaccines or in any way feed the crunchy-to-alt-right pipeline.

I do, however, think it’s important to take a holistic approach to our health and accept that mind and body are intricately linked. With that out of the way, let’s go on…

Upon seeing my raw skin, my GP prescribed me strong steroids. When I asked him if there was anything else I could do, he shrugged. “Limiting stress might help.”

I obsessively changed my diet, bedding and skincare. I listened to meditation tapes and did breathing exercises, as I lay awake. On my lowest nights, I trawled WebMD for answers. “There is no cure,” the website told me, in a paragraph that drove me to tears as I scrolled in cotton gloves, worn to stop me from scratching my skin until it bled. “It may go away and then come back.”

Physician Gabor Maté offered my first glimmer of hope, after months of increasingly debilitating insomnia. In his book When The Body Says No, he explores the mind-body link associated with autoimmune diseases and the role that chronic stress can play.

“If I chronically repress my emotional needs in order to make myself “acceptable” to other people,” Maté writes, “I increase my risks of having to pay the price in the form of illness.” Social media has the potential to create a sense of community. But in our desire for validation, we use all available means to make ourselves “acceptable” to others.

The pressure is felt particularly strongly by women, due to our aforementioned tendency toward self-surveillance. It may not surprise you to hear that 80% of autoimmune disease sufferers are female. In a society which rewards the suppression of our natural selves - in favour of prettier, happier, inauthentic masks - we pay the price of acceptance in physical terms.

In Maté’s words: “Emotional intimacy is a psychological and biological necessity. Those who build walls against intimacy are not self-regulated, just emotionally frozen. Their stress from having unmet needs will be high.”

Do look back in anger

There’s an antidote to our burnout - and we’ve been instinctively reaching for it for some time now. Gen Z’s often-discussed love of authenticity has initiated a shift away from glossy perfectionism, an attempt to smash social media’s veneer of toxic positivity.

The term “toxic positivity” is not new. It was first used by Columbia University Professor Jack Halberstam in 2011. His book, The Queer Art of Failure, is a capitalist critique that focuses on alternatives to our individualistic society.

“Being taken seriously [in our society],” Halberstam writes, “means missing out on the chance to be frivolous, promiscuous, and irrelevant. The desire to be taken seriously is precisely what compels people to follow the tried and true paths of knowledge production around which I would like to map a few detours.”

Online and offline, we take ourselves incredibly seriously. We take ourselves seriously from the pyjamas we sleep in and the brand of lip gloss we wear, down to our coffee order.

We don’t post the black engine oil we drink at home. We post oat flat whites and strawberry milk matcha lattes, bought from trending coffee shops. We don’t post our greasy-haired morning selves. We post mirror selfies, snapped right in the hairdresser’s chair.

We choose these images from the dozens of near-identical copies that flood our camera rolls, themselves copies of images posted by those more successful on social media than we are. Posting online has become a performance of conformity, rewarded via likes and encouraging comments.

Authentic negativity is a natural response to this excess of positivity. It manifests in rants, the antidote to saccharine get-ready-with-me videos. It manifests in man-repelling fashion, the antidote to performative soft femininity. It manifests in protest, the community-led antidote to our growing isolation. It manifests in outbursts of anger.

Anger is, not incidentally, the antidote physician Gabor Maté prescribes to his patients. “We have seen in study after study that compulsive positive thinkers are more likely to develop disease and less likely to survive,” he writes. “In order to heal, it is essential to gather the strength to think negatively.”

Quoting neuroscientist Candace Pert, Maté later adds: ”Sometimes the biggest impetus to healing can come from jump-starting the immune system with a burst of long-suppressed anger.”

Is it anger or is it rage?

Philosopher Byung-Chul Han doesn’t believe anger is the correct term.

“Rage puts the present as a whole into question,” he writes. “That is what distinguishes it from anger. The general distraction afflicting contemporary society does not allow the emphasis and energy of rage to arise.”

I found the distinction pedantic at first. What is rage, after all, if not the escalation of anger? But therein lies the answer. Anger simmers, rage erupts.

“Rage is the capacity to interrupt a given state and make a new state begin,” Han continues. “Today it is yielding more and more to offence and annoyance, ‘having a beef’, which proves incapable of effecting decisive change.”

Have you ever doom-scrolled? Have you ever silently rolled your eyes at each annoying video you scroll past? I know I have. If someone were to add up the hours I’ve wasted in this way, I’d have to seriously consider destroying my phone before it destroys me.

We spend our days floating down the lazy river of social media, on an underlying current of annoyance which leaves us with no energy to rage in earnest. The effects on our mental and physical health are undeniable.

The longer we allow this to continue, the more powerless we become.

Shedding my skin

My inflamed skin took over my life. Creams, ointments and lotions failed me. Herbal teas failed me. Steroids worked for a brief hopeful period until they, too, failed me.

Since childhood, I’ve struggled to process negative emotions. I instinctively suppressed any feelings deemed unfeminine, only allowing myself occasional private tears. But my ailing body forced me to cave in.

After months of smiling through the pain, I got ugly. My attitude matched the red raw fury of my skin. I screamed into pillows. I drank and sobbed uncontrollably. I complained. I threw a dinner plate on the floor and watched with satisfaction as it smashed on the kitchen tiles.

I was like a freshly tapped maple tree. I felt uncomfortable at first, sticky, oozing, disgusted with myself. But I slowly realised that the emotions flowing out of me could be turned into something wonderful. Instead of letting them eat away at me, I began to learn to direct my rage outward.

I made mistakes along the way. I erupted at inconvenient times, in unpredictable ways, at unsuspecting innocents. But my aim gradually improved. My ability to rage sharpened.

Two things have happened since my rediscovery of rage. First, I became more outspoken about my frustrations with the world. Talking about injustice scared me initially. I fretted over hateful comments, second-guessed my beliefs and apologised.

I still apologise too much, but I’m getting better. I’m getting more comfortable with raising my voice, and more uncomfortable with the psychological toll of staying silent.

The second thing that changed was my skin. Rage wasn’t a miracle cure, and it certainly didn’t work overnight. But in the space of several months, the itchy patches grew smaller and eventually disappeared.

I’m grateful to my flesh for saying no to me. It taught me a painful lesson about the cost of toxic positivity - as well as the power of negativity, rage and saying no. The lesson changed the trajectory of my life, for the better.

I no longer view myself as the main character. I prefer to think of myself as an imperfect part of an imperfect world, whose flaws warrant both kindness and rage.