Your Protagonist Should Be Popping Pills

     I like pills.
     No, not those kinds of pills; I like ibuprofen and my gabapentin and, when I need it, some good old 'cillin for those pesky hard-to-kill bacteria!
     I don't abuse anything prescription, or OTC (okay, maybe I take a little too much ibuprofen, but I do what I can to get by), but when I need them I need them. Some people think they make you weak (they don't), and I totally understand choosing not to medicate--if you've read my series on Tourette's, you know I chose not to medicate for that--but popping amoxacillin, tossing back some ondansetron, or chugging some cough syrup makes me feel like I'm doing something.  I can't get down on a germ's level to get my pathogenicide on, so I do the next best thing and drop some poison down my gullet (It's bacteria poison, not people poison, don't worry).
     Taking pills is an active measure--reactive, in a sense, but certainly not passive.
     So your protagonist should be popping pills, too--sometimes it's reactive pills, like a revenge plot, or a murder mystery, or a typical *shudder* Chosen One prophecy.  Sometimes your protagonist will be popping vitamins (or "vitamins") instead, a proactive measure, like when little kids go exploring in the attic, or a troubled youth starts plotting his first Get Rich Quick scheme, or a suspicious dude decides to stake out a sketchy guy's house just to see what the hell his deal is.
     Sometimes they'll have to procure the pills themselves (the pills are metaphors for options at this point) like when any character ever goes after meds for their grandmother (not-so-metaphorical), and sometimes they'll be handed them, like Neo in The Matrix (also not really a metaphor... Well, it was a metaphor in the movie, so I guess it's like a meta metaphor?).
     Neo ostensibly has two options--take the red pill, find out what all his shit's about, take the blue pill, pretend it never happened.  I think we can all agree that watching a blue-pill Neo would have been a really boring movie, which brings me to my next point--your character has to take the right pills--which are often actually the wrong pills.
     This is getting confusing and way too meta metaphorical, so I'm going to take a step back and stop talking about pills for a minute.
     The point is:  An active protagonist will, ninety nine percent of the time, make a much more interesting protagonist.  The actions they take may be the ones that destroy them, or the ones that eventually lift them up, but the active pursuit of something is far more interesting than passive acceptance.  If a character makes no decisions, or makes decisions only because they have literally no other choice ("I am the only person in the entire world that can stop the bad guy from killing literally everyone"), it's going to be much harder to make them sympathetic.
     Remember the friend you had in high school that always complained about their life, but never took steps to make things better, never took your advice, and did only what they had to to just barely skirt by?  You may have loved the hell out of them, but I bet they weren't a ton of fun to be around for any length of time; a passive protagonist is a lot like that friend, and unfortunately, a novel necessitates that a LOT of time be spent with them.
     We, as an audience, care more about the character that self-medicates with drugs or shrinks themselves down to microscopic size to murder their own parasites or goes on a murder spree when they find out their pharmaceutical company is screwing over people with cancer than we do about the one that finds out they're dying and just accepts it, rolls over, and waits for death or a savior.
     We like protagonists that, for good or ill, for better or worse, in intellect and stupidity and both sickness and health, have a goal in mind, even if it's a vague or reactive one, and take risks to try to accomplish that goal.
     Your audience, whether they know it or not, wants pill-poppers, and gosh darn it, they want those pills to be as red as a baboon's ass.