What if we're all narcissists?

A Pryor Thoughtsay

Photo by Hasib Khorami on Pexels

There’s an interesting passage written by Elizabeth Gilbert in her hugely popular book, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear.

In the interests of keeping it short (and not plagiarizing in the cold calculating eyes of Mr. Google), here’s what she said:

“Long ago, when I was in my insecure twenties, I met a clever, independent, creative, and powerful woman in her mid-seventies, who offered me a superb piece of life wisdom.

She said: “We all spend our twenties and thirties trying so hard to be perfect, because we’re so worried about what people will think of us. Then we get into our forties and fifties, and we finally start to be free, because we decide that we don’t give a damn what anyone thinks of us. But you won’t be completely free until you reach your sixties and seventies, when you finally realize this liberating truth—nobody was ever thinking about you, anyhow.”

They aren’t. They weren’t. They never were.”

I agree.

Nobody ever thinks about you.

And thus conversely, you never think about nobody, either.

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There are 86,400 seconds in a day. We spend approximately 28,800 of those sleeping, 3600 eating, and somewhere between 0 and ∞ watching the infinite scroll of our app du jour.

But how many seconds do we take every day to think of other people?

To give them attention in conversation? To thank them for a favor they did, for standing up for you in a meeting, or just for simply existing?

We all do it, but what percentage of our days are actually preoccupied with others?

I schedule my day around my own goals, my tasks, and my desired pleasures. I travel to different countries to see what unique experiences the world can offer me. I occasionally give money to the downtrodden because it helps someone out—and makes me feel a bit better in the process.

I also write “me” a lot.

We all do.

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At the Monday morning water cooler, we talk about what “me” did on the weekend. We brag about how amazing “me” kids are. We introduce ourselves as a grandstanded “me” whenever we get a new artificially inflated job title at work that somehow matters more than an actual wage increase.

Our stories, our self-image, our internal dialogues—for those who have them—revolve around the “me,” too.

We are all Davids in our minds, fighting different Goliaths based on thousands of unique minutia in our personal situations.

Your Goliath might be a person you hate, a boss you want to overtake, or an ex-lover you don’t want to physically hurt, but wouldn’t mind if they tripped and fell flat on their face.

Accidentally of course.

But Goliaths can be anything. Because we are Davids. We view the world through the lens of a David, where we are always the hero, with some inevitable foe to defeat.

And if this is true, which I’m starting to become convinced it is, then I can only make a simple conclusion:

We are all narcissists.

And maybe that’s okay.

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Melody Wilding, professor of Human Behavior, wrote that “psychologically speaking, narcissism is a personality trait that every person possesses to some degree.”

She believes narcissism is yet another trait of humanity that exists not in a standalone either-or scenario but rather exists on a scale.

Those in the extreme end—I’m sure you can pick an infamous politician at random and picture who I’m talking about— are declared to have a narcissistic personality disorder.

Those lower on the scale—perhaps every single one of us—merely exhibit signs of the trait from time to time.

But if everyone in the land is truly a narcissist, then who is the one-eyed man?

Or does it even matter?

We go on InstaTwitterBook to signal how amazing of a life we live, what we care about, what matters to ‘us’, and more often, what we truly hate.

But underlying all of these actions is a simple premise; it’s to show others how much “me” we can be.

Apparently, that’s what’s known as virtue signaling. To me, it’s becoming a fixture.

The more I look at all the world’s seemingly increasing number of problems through the lens of the “me,” the more I’m starting to think it’s one of the meta-factors in our society’s slow unraveling.

Name any major topic in today’s political world, regardless of country, and tell me it’s not about a threat to the self. A threat to the way the world was in an imaginary utopia is the main message of most populist groups, far-right or far-left.

“They’re taking away your jobs/rights/homes/safety/way of living!” ad infinitum.

It’s a message of fear—one that works incredibly well when a world is in a state of panic from increasing wealth disparity, rapid technological change, pandemics, and wars.

These perceived threats—and the assholes who knowingly carry them—work because they touch the “me.” Their message is your core being, your narcissistic self-love that we all necessarily have as human beings, is under attack by an external “they.”

It’s a tempting message.

An external source of blame for what we internally fear. It strips us of responsibility, even when the true way forward should be internal reflection and acknowledgment.

It’s an appeal to the easy answer, the outward blame, and the freedom of being responsible for something bad.

When we look at narcissism through this lens, it’s a terrible thing.

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But there is another way to look at the “me”—a far more positive one.

And for that, we go back to the rest of Elizabeth Gilbert’s passage:

“People are mostly just thinking about themselves. People don’t have time to worry about what you’re doing, or how well you’re doing it, because they’re all caught up in their own dramas. People’s attention may be drawn to you for a moment (if you succeed or fail spectacularly and publicly, for instance), but that attention will soon enough revert right back to where it’s always been—on themselves. While it may seem lonely and horrible at first to imagine that you aren’t anyone else’s first order of business, there is also a great release to be found in this idea. You are free, because everyone is too busy fussing over themselves to worry all that much about you.

Go be whomever you want to be, then.

You are free, because everyone is too busy fussing over themselves to worry all that much about you.

Go be whomever you want to be, then.

Do whatever you want to do.

Pursue whatever fascinates you and brings you to life.

Create whatever you want to create—and let it be stupendously imperfect, because it’s exceedingly likely that nobody will even notice.

And that’s awesome.”

I like this. Simply because it takes a negative trait we all have in some form, and spins it into a positive.

While the rise of “me” has been proliferating through our society, perhaps because of social media and all the externalities it failed to account for, we still have a choice.

We can carry on through life worrying about what others think of us; if we’re too fat, too smelly, or our peanut butter tuna sandwiches aren’t yet in perfect form.

Or

We can choose to be free in a way. To remind ourselves that no one really thinks about you, at least not as often as we want/desire/fear.

And if that’s true, then the worry of being embarrassing or failing or succeeding too grandiosely can dissipate.

And with dissipation can come freedom.

The freedom to be a little narcissistic, to pursue the fun in life, and to be proud of being weird.

And that’s a “me” I aspire to be.

Call me narcissistic, I won’t care, because if any of this is true, you won’t either, after a few seconds.

And that’s probably a good thing. You have a “me” to go be.

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