The Quiet Fear of Being an NPC

"NPC" is a borrowing from video games, where it stands for a non-player character, one of the background figures who wander a scene repeating the same few fixed lines. As slang, it describes a person judged to be much the same, moving through life without much independent thought and following the crowd rather than choosing a path of their own, in the manner of a flock that wheels all at once for reasons none of them could name. The image attached to it is a plain grey face, blank and expressionless, which first appeared on the forum 4chan around 2016, where it was used chiefly to dismiss people on the other side of an argument.

For a time the term belonged mostly to political quarrels, a quick way of accusing an opponent of parroting whatever they had been told. It has since slipped free of all that and grown milder and more general. To be an NPC now is simply to be running on autopilot, going through the ordinary motions without really being present, and people apply it as readily to themselves as to others. There even arose a curious fashion for imitating the characters directly, performers on livestreams repeating the same cheerful phrases on cue, like tame birds trained to a single call, in exchange for small tips from their viewers.

What sits underneath is a very modern anxiety, the fear of drifting through one's days on rails, doing what the feed suggests and thinking what everyone else appears to think. Naming it is a way of guarding against it, and there is something rather healthy in a person who can catch themselves being an NPC and say so with a smile. The honest truth, observed from the hedgerow, is that a great deal of any creature's life is simple routine, the same paths worn smooth by habit, and the only trick is to look up now and then and notice that one is walking them.