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For those of us who remember the rotary dial phone, Dick Cheney or the Jane Fonda workout, Main Character Energy is a movement spearheaded by people aged 16-29, usually sitting cross-legged on the floor. Their main manifesto involves telling everyone how they have been living their lives all wrong and issuing the call to arms that “If your life was a movie would you be the main character?”

Some heavily influenced people have elected to enact this breakout role in the middle of a stuffed bus, amid the sweaty, exhausted masses, who are desperate for a kebab around 5:30 p.m.

Instead, we get Courtney from Milwaukee who decides to open her umbrella inside the bus just to be different; and, while occupying a seat reserved for the elderly or disabled, we have Aston from Orillia shouting into his phone (probably to someone on the toilet) that he’s about to close on 10,000 … while the rest of us are left mouthing at him that a 93-year-old or a woman pregnant with twins needs to sit down.

Historically, if a person wished to convert you to themselves or to join a church, donate to charity, support their sports team, or speak a new language, they would have to sell it to you with eye contact and a tantalizing verbal delivery before they could conclude why, yes, they’d won you over to purchase those five volumes of the Encyclopedia of Garden Gnomes. Today, there’s no such ambition, or even a preamble; it is simply a person who doesn’t have/want/believe in the use of headphones but does want to mindlessly scroll on TikTok all the way home so everyone in this subway car or hospital waiting room is going to watch and hear it too.

What on earth has happened to us? I think we no longer appreciate that public space is not the same as lying on your bed, farting and being a self-indulgent teenager. Public space is also not just a single channel for you and your screen (or for you to reenact your screen?). Have we disappeared so far inside “the phones” that they are now the active architectural space and the café or subway a mere invented inconvenience?

Let us imagine inviting someone to your apartment and saying “I’m just popping upstairs to take a bath, do you want to bring up a chair and listen to me turn on the tap and splash about?”

Or how about proposing a first date to that handsome stranger to join you at the car wash with the windows open?

Because this is what’s happening daily, if you sit or stand beside some earphone less imp on transit, who decides to force feed the entire bus their leapfrogging TikToks of fake Barack Obama phone calls and cats yowling on a hot tin roof.

When did being average, conscientious, aware of your surroundings and having a decent set of manners become such a sin?

Main Character Energy Gone Postal is strangely unifying the generations, since the ancient are some of the worst offenders. Older people have learned terrible new habits from those leading the way: the humble teens. Teenagers, however, do achieve developmental milestones towards realizing they aren’t the only folk on the planet. The problem is that buses, cafes and, yes, even sitting in the ER at 3 a.m., can’t accommodate 60 members of the public being exclusively Main Characters. For public space, transit and health care to function and include everyone, it can only support 60 co-operative and respectful members of a charming chorus. Practically speaking, you can’t even respond to the collapse or distress of a fellow citizen if you are crouched over your phone conducting a cacophony. How about we agree: You can be the Main Character in your living room or the bath.

In the words of Cardi B “Act like you have some manners” or as the Good Lord Jesus might have put it: Headphones in or it’s a sin.