The Protagonist Syndrome: Why Are You Struck in Stories?

C. The Protagonist Syndrome

Syndrome

A syndrome is a name given to a cluster of psychological, physical, or pathological changes in your body due to a certain condition of mind or body. For example Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome(PCOS). Even though PCOS is identified by cysts in the ovary, there are several other pathologies like insulin resistance, Estrogen resistance, and sets of symptoms such as hair fall associated with PCOS.

A syndrome is a cluster of problems, symptoms, and changes in the mind and body that is a precursor to disease. Therefore a syndrome is a starting point of a disease. It is a temporary state and if not addressed, this progresses to a disease.

Protagonist Syndrome

So your mind has memories, current interactions with reality, enrichment of the protagonist through these interactions, feelings, learnings, thoughts, observations, and so on and so forth.

We all sit and think about our life, ruminate about our life. When we think about our life, it is the protagonist we are thinking about. And whenever we are thinking back to our life, we are essentially watching a story of the protagonist representing the core of us, navigating through our life.

As the protagonist exists in the imagination, the more we imagine our life, the bigger the protagonist becomes. Your imaginary brain now attaches independent feelings to the protagonist and slowly the protagonist starts growing as the dominant character in your life. The more you imagine, the more your thoughts and feelings are centered around this protagonist.

Whenever you interact with the world, your brain slowly fails to interact with reality, and rather every interaction is done through the protagonist. The reality slowly starts becoming an imagination. You start seeing your entire life in reality, from your childhood till this point.

Now take a pause. Are you reading this article, or merely glancing while your brain is playing a movie of your life and looking for only those parts and sentences in the article that makes the protagonist feels good?

Stop. Answer this question. Are you reading this article to understand every bit, or while you were reading, your brain was playing various snapshots from your life and was looking for a correlation with the article?

At this point, you may realize that you deviated way away from this article, and the article has merely become a mine where the protagonist in you is looking for bits that are relevant to it, that provide it good experiences and feelings. Even though you think you are interacting with the article, you are not, you are simply interacting with your imagination which is looking at reality to pull anything that is beneficial for the imagination.