Some people crave being a “regular”. They walk in and say what’s up to the cashier. Ask how their mom is. Talk about their weekends. Make a few jokes. Get a free cookie with their espresso when there are extra cookies that the place needs to pawn off. That sort of thing.
Sometimes I crave this, too. It can be nice to be a regular.
But other times, and really most of the time, I crave the opposite. I want to be an anti-regular. I want to walk into the cafe and get the same greeting everyone else gets. I don’t want to be pulled into some kind of social interaction. I don’t want special treatment from the staff. I don’t want everyone else in the café (or store or restaurant) to now know what my name is, what my weekend was like, and how my parents are doing. I just want to be a random guy!
(This is true, by the way, not a bit. There are places I visit less frequently now that I have ‘regular’ status and know that walking in will tend to involve all of the above.)
People like to talk about main character energy. They speak about it as though it’s a good thing you should want, like walking into somewhere and having to navigate a dozen dialogue trees is a positive. Me personally, though, I’m more interested in background character energy. I’m there in the corner enjoying my meal underneath some Gaussian blur so the main character walking in and chatting with the cashier barely notices me; I’m just background noise. That’s nice.
I think part of the thrill of going to China (or other less-touristed parts of Asia) for non-Asian people is that it’s a cheat code to becoming the main character. Everyone’s looking at you. Some people will come up and ask you for photos. People will call you handsome or pretty. For someone who often craves background character energy, though, that experience is a negative. It’s hard to be a background character when everyone is looking at you.
Perhaps there’s a world where you get control over your settings. Like the conversation preferences they added to Uber, but for real life. Of course I think that would come off as very anti-social and probably wouldn’t work and sounds a little like the ultra-dystopian episode of Black Mirror, White Christmas. But I don’t know. Maybe it wouldn’t be like that.
Maybe I’d walk into the café. They say “hello,” and I say hello back. I order my coffee. They say “here’s your coffee.” Some other guy comes in and starts talking at max volume about his weekend and his birthday party; it’s clear he’s a regular. I read a book in the corner and have a really great afternoon. I am the background character here and life has never felt better.
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