Feel Like an Extra in Your Own Life? What Psychology Says

Why we feel like extras

This feeling comes from comparison. Leon Festinger (1954) explained that we evaluate ourselves by comparing ourselves with others. The problem is that we compare other people's "highlight reels" with our whole lives — including the ordinary days nobody ever posts.

Ordinary days feel like a life that isn't moving, when in fact most of everyone's life is made of ordinary days.

Others notice us far less than we think

Oddly, while we feel like extras, we also often feel overly watched. Research by Gilovich, Medvec, and Savitsky (2000) on the spotlight effect had students wear an embarrassing T-shirt into a room. They estimated that about half the people present would notice, when far fewer actually did.

In other words, everyone is busy being the main character of their own story. You're not an overlooked extra — you're a main character who's too busy watching other people's stories.

Your life is a story you're writing

Psychologists Dan McAdams and Kate McLean (2013) describe narrative identity: the way we tell the story of our own lives shapes who we are. People who can see meaning and growth in hard experiences tend to have better well-being.

The good news is that this story can be rewritten. Not by changing what happened, but by changing how you make sense of it.

How to stop feeling like an extra

• Note the small things that happen each day. A good conversation, a finished task, a decision you made. An "ordinary" life turns out to be full of scenes.
• Look at your growth over time. Compare yourself with a year ago, not with other people today.
• Watch less, live more. Every hour spent watching someone else's life is an hour not spent writing your own story.
• Pick one thing that matters to you this week. Main characters have goals — however small.

Write your own story, every day

Daily check-ins in rumputhijau are a simple way to record the small scenes of your life, and the weekly Laporan Makna sums them up into a story you can see — proof that you're living your own life, not just watching someone else's.

References

• Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7(2), 117–140.
• Gilovich, T., Medvec, V. H., & Savitsky, K. (2000). The spotlight effect in social judgment: An egocentric bias in estimates of the salience of one's own actions and appearance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(2), 211–222.
• McAdams, D. P., & McLean, K. C. (2013). Narrative identity. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22(3), 233–238.