ArcaMax

I think I saw my first TikToker in the wild.

For a split second, I thought it might be a politician filming a video. He wore a black vest, a burgundy shirt, and a cowboy hat, and he repeated the same forceful upward motion with his hand. He'd freeze, lean toward a phone on a stand, and do the same routine again.

He had an older white work truck, parked at an angle, just so. The backdrop was an old adobe building that had quietly marked time for those who live in town. Right now, it's an Indian restaurant. Before that, it was something else, and before that, something else.

I'm from the era when it was a bail bonds office, a detail that sticks because it sits right next to the courthouse. From the urban cowboy's phone, the framing probably read as rugged and timeless. Less "across from a CVS," which it was, and more "Wild West authenticity," which, sure, it technically was... at some point.

The street was thick with cars moving through the familiar choreography of morning and the routine hum of obligation. Parents dropping off their kids at school or workers heading toward their clock-ins. I watched him from the middle lane until another car slid between us, and I felt a brief surreality. Would his video land on my For You page in a few days? Would I recognize the angle, the carefully cropped version of the place we both shared?

I watched him out of curiosity, while he performed to an invisible audience that mattered more than the traffic passing behind him. In his version of the morning, we were background motion, NPCs -- the non-playable characters, a term from video games -- filling in the scene.

Earlier in the drive, my kids and I had been wrapped up in spotting a black cloud hovering over downtown as we drove to school. They debated which building it could be: the library, City Hall, or maybe their school. I reminded them that this is the time of year when we see more fires as people try to stay warm but ultimately lose control of one of our most ancient companions. We caught a glimpse of a smoldering house behind the police department from the street.

Even that moment felt like a small example of how we center ourselves in the story. In our car, the cloud existed because of how it might affect us. In someone else's morning, it was a horror, an inconvenience, part of the job, a sign, or a headline during the morning news scroll.

We all live this way now, as protagonists of tightly framed narratives. Each of us walks through town with an internal monologue that casts us as thoughtful, justified, complex. Other people appear as obstacles, supporting characters, or brief sources of irritation and intrigue. The man filming the video was the main character in his story. To me, he was a visual oddity at a stoplight.

The trouble begins when we forget that this dynamic cuts both ways, especially when we treat disagreement as villainy rather than a different perspective. When we assume malice where there may be habit, fear, or a different camera angle entirely. Our thinking of others as NPCs can be efficient. It keeps our stories clean and coherent, and as the main storyline.

It also flattens the world.

That old adobe building has been many things. Each version felt permanent to someone at the time. The TikTok he made will live for a few seconds, maybe longer if it catches someone's attention. But the traffic moved on. The cloud of smoke dispersed. Everyone involved will continue believing, correctly, that they were at the center of something.

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Cassie McClure is a writer, millennial, and unapologetic fan of the Oxford comma. She can be contacted at cassie@mcclurepublications.com. To learn more about Cassie McClure and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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