Not Everything Is About You. Please Learn to Scroll.

Rose Hirst
2 days ago
3 min read

The rise of “what-about-me-ism.” Why nobody can just scroll past anymore.

Imagine you share a recipe for banana bread online. A seemingly innocuous act: imparting knowledge about a specific baked good. So why does the comments section suddenly become riddled with controversy?

“What if I don’t like bananas?”

“But I am gluten free?”

“I don’t have an oven at my house.”

“I’m in a calorie deficit. This is far too many calories per serving”

It’s all down to this phenomenon, “what-about-me-ism.” Why do people feel that everything they encounter online must be personally tailored to fit their personal preferences? What happened to seeing something, deciding it wasn’t for you, and moving on? This particular occurrence tends to be most prevalent in the online world; perhaps that’s because it’s where we can see it (i.e., the comment section).

Do people in real life walk into an ice cream store and declare that they have sensitive teeth and can’t eat ice cream? Do people go to see a film in a foreign language and loudly lament it for using subtitles?

Probably not.

But main character syndrome, at least online, is well and truly thriving. So why do people feel that everything must align with their own personal experiences and preferences? Is it simply an inflated sense of entitlement? Perhaps years of exposure to highly personalised algorithmic content has conditioned us to expect total personal relevance in all aspects of life.

These bespoke feeds serve us a stream of information, cherry-picked to be palatable to our personal tastes, reinforcing the feeling that everything must somehow be perfectly tailored to suit our own preferences.

Gone are the days of navigating a Blockbuster video store filled to the brim with DVDs, sifting through stacks of unwanted options to find a movie we like. Now we have Netflix accounts that know us better than our own spouses and serve us helpfully suggested, tailored recommendations night after night.

There’s no longer any need to buy an entire CD containing one or two songs we love, only to endure the many superfluous tracks we have to skip. Now we have Spotify, where we can arrange playlists of our desire at the click of a button.

TikTok learns our preferences and serves them up with such terrifying accuracy that we can fall into an entertaining rabbit hole of personalised content, emerging hours later blinking and disoriented, and perhaps with a creeping subconscious sense that everything on the internet should indeed be catered to us.

On TikTok, there’s a name for this practice. It’s called the “bean soup effect”, the theory that users will see a recipe for bean soup and, rather than searching for another recipe that encompasses their ingredients of choice, they will complain that they don’t like beans, and chastise the recipe creator for being so selfish as to not cater for their specific soup requirements.

In recent years, therapy speak has given people a new vocabulary and the language to empower and embrace their hyper-individuality, prioritising themselves at all costs.

If something doesn’t suit them, they have the phrases to justify their decision not to comply. Gone are the days of attending a mundane event out of societal and social pressure; now, cancelling plans at the last minute is framed as “protecting your peace” or “optimising your time”, rather than being flaky.

Declining an invitation is no longer labelled antisocial; it’s simply “setting boundaries.”

While this system isn’t inherently bad (protecting one’s mental health by setting boundaries can be genuinely important in the right circumstances), it’s starting to creep into the territory of treating everyday preferences with an urgency that perhaps they don’t warrant.

Thirty years ago, people didn’t have the means to simply cancel last minute, at least not without really leaving someone in the lurch. In 1996, if you arranged to meet someone for coffee at a particular time on a particular date, and on the day you felt a little tired, or you got a better offer, you’d have to call them on their home phone and hope they would answer. That awkward rejection had to happen in real time, or you’d leave them floundering around at the coffee shop wondering if you’d been in an accident.

People generally kept plans not only out of duty, but also because the alternative was uncomfortable and inconvenient. Now, all it takes is a 10-second thumb tap to send a message: “Sorry, can’t make it, rain check?” and you’re free to go back to scrolling on TikTok, commenting on people’s clam chowder recipes, saying you’re allergic to seafood.