the 'what about me?' effect
contrary to popular belief, the world does not revolve around you
The other day I was scrolling on TikTok when I saw a video that made me stop in my tracks (rare for me to see something that demands more than a half section of my attention on that app- no one tell Bytedance!)
The video was of a girl called Sarah talking about something she’s calling the “what about me” effect.
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Sarah describes this phenomenon as a combination of ‘individualistic culture’ and ‘being chronically online’ which leads some people to see something - in this case on their TikTok feed - that doesn’t really relate to them, and try to find a way to make it about them. Then, she gives an excellent example about Bean Soup.
So a girl on TikTok made a video on how to make Bean Soup. BEAN SOUP okay, the main ingredient being BEANS. After she posted the original video, she started getting bombarded with comments like:
“well what if I don’t like beans?” or
“beans aren’t good for my stomach” or
“what could I substitute the beans for?”
The original creator had more patience than me, because she made a really nice follow-up video for all the people wanting to know how they could make the BEAN SOUP accommodate their very niche situations. I would have made a video telling them to search a pumpkin soup recipe.
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If it’s not commenting about a bean substitute for a ‘bean soup’ recipe, it’s seeing a review for a romance novel and commenting ‘what would you suggest a sci-fi fan reads? or a hairstyle for long hair and commenting ‘what should I do if I have a bob?’ or even a travel video of a waterfall in New Zealand and commenting ‘what if I don’t live in New Zealand?’
Commenting shit like this on people’s videos (rather than simply scrolling on) feels like more than just a lack of common sense, Sarah says. She thinks it’s actually a product of our incessant need to feel individual - and I have a theory about this.
To me, the ‘what about me’ effect lives in the same world as main character syndrome, where the internet (which is now little more than algorithmic hell) has put us at the centre of it all, and made us expect that everything we see on our feed must be perfectly tailored to us. Otherwise, what’s the payoff for ‘them’ having all our data? This expectation has made us extremely self-centred, unable to cope with other people’s circumstances, and was not the original goal of the Internet (after all, it was called Internet Explorer, not Internet Show-Me-Everything-I-Already-Know-And-Agree-With-er.)
So next time you feel personally attacked by something that comes across your feed because you don’t feel like it was directly made or meant for you… it’s because it wasn’t.
And that’s okay ◡̈
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I do think Sarah makes a great point about it being an American thing, and now with tiktok it seems like its infecting more and and more people from outside of the US. American's have been fed the individualist attitude their whole lives that's how we get 'It's sad kids are getting killed in schools but they can't take MY guns away from ME' kinda attitudes and we're just seeing it more in different ways unfortunately
But what if I don’t want to read a newsletter telling me that everything isn’t about me? 😉