Are We All Just NPCs In Someone Else’s Group Chat?
What if your entire personality is just a glitchy combo of caffeine, Wi‑Fi, and that one traumatic haircut you got in middle school?
Welcome to the theory: you, me, and the guy arguing with a self-checkout machine at 11:47 p.m. might be background characters in somebody else’s chaotic group chat storyline.
This is not deep philosophy. This is dumb philosophy. The best kind.
Below are 5 dangerously shareable reasons this “We’re All NPCs” idea is starting to feel…uncomfortably accurate.
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1. Main Characters Don’t Wait For Software Updates To Be Confident
In every movie, the main character has a dramatic moment of realization and suddenly becomes bold, confident, and strangely well-lit.
You? You stand in the kitchen staring at the microwave for three minutes, wondering if you *actually* hit start or just thought spiritually about heating your food.
If life were a game, your character sheet would look like this:
- Charisma: 7/10 (goes up to 9/10 in memes-only conversations)
- Social Skills: “Depends on Wi‑Fi strength”
- Confidence: DLC not yet downloaded
- Core Power: Can hold 37 tabs open and remember none of them
Real main characters make decisions like “quit job, move to another country.”
You make decisions like “I *could* change my life…or I could rewatch the same show from season one because my brain likes familiarity and light emotional damage.”
Viral share-point:
Everyone has that one friend who acts like the star of a coming-of-age movie while the rest of us are essentially the barista who says, “Name for the order?” and then never appears again. Tag them. Let the chaos begin.
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2. The Universe Keeps Throwing Side Quests Instead Of Fixing The Main Plot
If your life was a game, the main quest would be something noble like:
> “Discover your purpose and become your most authentic self.”
But the quests you actually get are:
- “Find Charging Cable: Timed Mission (5% battery)”
- “Respond To Message You Opened 9 Days Ago: Legendary Difficulty”
- “Figure Out What That Random Pain Is: Horror DLC”
You wake up planning to get your life together, then suddenly:
- 1 mildly inconvenient email
- 1 notification from a shopping app you don’t remember installing
- 1 thought: “What if I just lay down for a second”
- …and boom, it’s 1:37 a.m., you’re watching a video about how crayons are made, and your main quest is still lying there like “hey :) remember me?”
Side quests aren’t even glamorous. No dragons. No treasure. Just:
- Your sink, quietly evolving into its own ecosystem
- That one drawer full of cables for devices you haven’t owned since 2014
- The annual “I should really start stretching” internal monologue
Viral share-point:
Drop this to your group chat with the caption: “BRB, stuck on the ‘Drink Water’ side quest for the 5th year in a row.”
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3. Glitches In The Simulation: AKA “Why Did I Just Walk Into This Room?”
Let’s talk bugs in the human operating system.
You have:
- Perfect memory for embarrassing moments from 8 years ago
- Zero memory of why you just opened the fridge
- 4K HD recall of that one time you waved back at someone who wasn’t waving at you
If a video game did this, you would return it.
Your brain is basically:
> “You wanted childhood humiliation in 1080p? Say less.”
> “Your car keys? Never heard of them.”
And then there’s lag:
- Someone tells a joke
- You don’t get it
- You laugh anyway
- 4 minutes later, it finally lands, and you laugh again alone like a broken NPC replaying a dialogue line out of sync
Also, those jump-scare “Did I send that to the right person?” moments?
Pure simulation error. No human consciousness should be able to experience that level of dread from pressing “send.”
Viral share-point:
Share this with the caption: “If you’ve ever walked into a room and forgotten why, you’ve been patched mid-game.”
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4. Main Characters Get Theme Music, We Get Ads
You know how in movies, whenever the main character is about to do something powerful, the soundtrack swells?
In real life, your dramatic walking-down-the-street moment gets interrupted by:
- An ad for a mattress you googled once at 2 a.m.
- Someone loudly talking on speakerphone about their cat’s diet
- Three different car alarms auditioning to be the worst sound in existence
Your life soundtrack:
- 20% songs you genuinely love
- 40% TikTok audios worming into your brain
- 40% the same chorus stuck on loop because your brain refuses to learn the rest of the lyrics
You try to have a main-character moment looking thoughtfully out a window, and the reflection reveals:
- You in a hoodie from three days ago
- Hair that’s giving “final boss: static electricity”
- Face that says “I forgot I have a face”
Viral share-point:
Ask your followers, “If my life had a soundtrack, what song would play when I walk into a room?” Then try not to cry when someone says it’s just the Windows error sound.
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5. Every Group Has That One Chaos NPC (And If You Don’t…It’s You)
Open any group chat and you can immediately identify the party roles:
- The Planner: Actually knows what day it is. Owns a calendar. Terrifying.
- The Lore Keeper: Remembers every inside joke since 2016.
- The Healer: Sends “drink water” and “proud of you” messages like potions.
- The Chaos NPC: Sends voice notes that start with “Okay so don’t be mad…”
The Chaos NPC energy is unmistakable:
- Shows up late but with stories
- Accidentally triggers 73 notifications at once by reacting to every message from the past week
- Will absolutely say, “We should all live together” with the confidence of someone who has never lived with anyone’s dishes
The wild part?
Somehow, despite all evidence, every single person in the friend group believes *they* are the sensible one holding things together.
Statistically impossible. Hilarious. Deeply concerning.
Viral share-point:
Drop this article in your group chat and say, “Tag yourselves, I’m the loading screen.” Then watch everyone fight over who the real Chaos NPC is. Spoiler: it’s still you.
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Conclusion
If life is a game, we’re clearly not all playing the same difficulty level. Some people are out here on “Story Mode” with supportive NPCs and clean desktop backgrounds, while the rest of us keep accidentally soft-locking ourselves in the Procrastination Dungeon.
But maybe that’s the point.
Maybe we’re all NPCs in each other’s stories, glitching, lagging, side-questing… and occasionally teaming up for co-op missions like:
- “Survive Monday”
- “Make Plans We’ll All Cancel Later”
- “Send Each Other Memes Instead Of Real Emotional Vulnerability”
So no, you might not feel like the main character all the time.
But you are absolutely somebody’s favorite background character.
And if all else fails, remember:
The bar for “doing well at life” is currently somewhere between “replies eventually” and “remembers to eat.”
You’re doing fine.
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Sources
- [American Psychological Association – Why we procrastinate](https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2010/04/procrastination) – Explores the science behind procrastination and self-regulation, which fuels a lot of those “side quest” vibes
- [Harvard Business Review – Why You Feel So Busy and Yet So Unproductive](https://hbr.org/2016/03/why-you-feel-so-busy-and-yet-so-unproductive) – Discusses attention, distraction, and why our brains feel overloaded by tiny tasks
- [Verywell Mind – What Is Working Memory?](https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-working-memory-2795233) – Explains why you can forget why you walked into a room but remember old embarrassing moments perfectly
- [Pew Research Center – Mobile Fact Sheet](https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/) – Data on smartphone and notification overload, feeding the “constant side quest” feeling
- [Stanford University – The Effects of Multitasking on the Brain](https://news.stanford.edu/2009/08/24/multitask-research-study-082409/) – Research on how juggling too many tasks at once can glitch our attention and memory