examples of narcissistic behaviour explained — 1 brief investigation

examples, plural, is what you give in court. i have not been to court. i have been to a coffee place where someone i used to date asked me to lower my voice while explaining things she did. the coffee was bad.

i am, as it happens, writing this down on a wednesday at 10:38am, from the desk at which i am paid to do other things. carla is in the budget alignment session on the third floor, the meeting where they decide which meetings to keep, which is, structurally, a meeting about itself. i have, by my own conservative estimate, the rest of the morning before anyone notices that the cursor in my actual document has not moved since coffee.

so. the brief is, as the title goes, examples of narcissistic behaviour, with the u, because the BBC says behaviour and because the productivity bro on the timeline who lit this whole fuse spelled it that way and then accused his replies of being “too american”. i am writing this down to settle a private question. you are reading it because the algorithm decided, on a wednesday, that it should be your turn.

writing this from the desk. carla is upstairs in the budget alignment thing. coffee number two has happened. the barista, who knows my order, did not ask. i tipped anyway because she is, on most weeks, the only person who reads me on my way in.

before the list, the disclaimer. before the disclaimer, the cause. before the cause, the spelling.

1. examples of narcissistic behaviour, the disclaimer

i am not a clinician. a clinician is a person with a parking spot at a hospital. i write blog posts on company equipment. these are different jobs and they pay differently. examples of narcissistic behaviour, the phrase, is what you type into a search bar at 1am after a phone call with someone who told you, calmly, that the thing you remember did not happen.

everything below is, technically, an investigation. it is one man’s notes from an earlier post on the gaslighting pattern from a relationship that ended in 2019, plus a few items i have, in the months since, added to a folder on my phone that i do not recommend keeping but cannot bring myself to delete. the folder is, in spirit, a small museum.

i am also using behaviour with the u on purpose. you can have your opinion about the spelling. the BBC has theirs. mine, today, is theirs. it is a wednesday. i am allowed.

everything in this post is conduct i either watched, was on the receiving end of, or sat next to at a wedding. names are bent. details are softened. a volvo, somewhere, is not being mentioned by make. you are welcome.

2. the productivity bro tweet that lit this fuse

the cause of this post, since you asked, is a tweet i should not have read at 9:47am from a productivity bro who has, on his pinned thread, the following: “narcissistic behaviour is just confidence the weak don’t understand. fight me.” the tweet had, when i screenshotted it, eleven thousand likes. i am sure it has more now. i refuse to refresh.

this is the kind of sentence a man writes at 6:14am after his cold plunge and before his oat-milk americano, in the tone of a man who has never been corrected, in front of his friends, about a story from his own life. he means it. that is what makes it useful. it is a clean, photographable example of the thing the post is about, dressed up as the opposite.

my group chat, which is muted, surfaced the screenshot at 9:51am. the muted group chat is muted for a reason: when un-muted, the group chat becomes a parliament, and parliaments rarely close on time. but the muted group chat still notifies me with a small grey number, and the small grey number, on a wednesday, said sixteen. sixteen people had something to say about the productivity bro. i opened the chat. i read three messages. i muted it again. the energy in there was, as we say, costly.

the bro, i should add, is selling a course. he is always selling a course. thank you for smoking is a film about a man who sells confidence by the kilo, and the productivity bro is, structurally, that character with worse lighting and a podcast. i am not citing it as research. i am citing it as a vibe.

3. examples 1 to 4, the obvious ones

the obvious ones are obvious because you’ve read about them, or you’ve sat in a kitchen near them, or you have, at some point, been the person they were aimed at. they do not require an audit to identify. they require, at most, a second cup of coffee.

1. the conversation hijack. you are telling a story about your week. four sentences in, the story is about their week, and your role is now nodding witness. the hijack is so smooth that you only notice when you reach for the punchline of your own anecdote and find it has been, in flight, replaced. you go home. you mention to no one that you didn’t get to finish the story. you make tea. the tea is, in this scene, the only honest object.

2. the credit re-route. a thing went well. you did the thing. they describe the thing, in a room that contains both of you, as something we did, with a heavy lean on the we and a courteous nod toward you that registers, to anyone watching closely, as the nod a man gives the chair he is about to sit on. you do not correct this. correcting this would be petty. petty is what they will call you if you do.

3. the rewritten memory. you bring up a thing they said. they did not say it. you have a text. the text, on inspection, was misread by you. there is, in this exchange, no version of the original sentence that survives. the sentence is, in narrative terms, a casualty. you start, somewhere around month four, screenshotting the texts that have not yet been disputed. the screenshots fill a folder. the folder is named, with the optimism of a man who thought he was joking, evidence.

4. the contempt-as-honesty. you wear something. they tell you, with the kind smile of a person doing you a favour, that you “couldn’t pull it off, sweetheart”. this is presented, in the moment, as straight talk from someone who loves you enough to be honest. you take off the thing. you do not wear it again. you do not, six months later, remember that you used to like it. the trick of contempt-as-honesty is that it leaves no fingerprints, only a smaller wardrobe.

4. examples 5 to 8, the muted-group-chat ones

the muted-group-chat examples are quieter. they live in the screenshots people send the group chat at 11:14pm on a sunday and then ask, with three question marks, whether anyone else thinks this is a problem. the answer is yes. the answer is always yes. but the muted group chat takes a day to coalesce, and by the time it does, the person who posted the screenshot has, often, decided to give it one more chance.

5. the calm correction in front of friends. three of your friends are in the room. you tell a story about the holiday. they correct, calmly, a small detail. the small detail makes you, in the story, slightly more foolish. nobody at the table notices. you notice. for the next two hours, you replay the moment. on monday, in the muted group chat, you do not bring it up. on tuesday, in the shower, you bring it up to no one.

6. the gift that is a comment. they buy you a thing. the thing is, on its surface, generous. the thing is, on inspection, a note. the gym membership when you mentioned, once, that your back hurt. the cookbook when you cooked them dinner. the book on small talk after the dinner with their boss. each gift is, technically, kind. each gift is, accumulated, a file. the file does not flatter you.

7. the silent treatment with a smile. you have done a thing they consider a slight. the thing was, by any normal standard, a tuesday — you were tired, you were five minutes late, you forgot to text on the walk home. the response is not a fight. the response is two days of polite, clipped, content-free pleasantness. you ask if everything is okay. they say yes. they smile. you spend the entire two days reverse-engineering the slight. by day three, you apologise for an offence you have invented. they accept the apology graciously. the file thickens.

8. the tally in arguments. a small disagreement, on a wednesday, about the dishwasher — which is, separately, a cabinet that judges you — escalates, somehow, into a list of seven things you said in 2017 and have not yet been forgiven for. you did not bring 2017 to the kitchen. 2017 was waiting in a drawer. the drawer is theirs. you do not have an equivalent drawer because you, like a normal person, threw 2017 out with the rest of 2017.

CONFIDENCE. DOES. NOT. KEEP. A. DRAWER.

i need that on the wall, metaphorically, because the productivity bro is, even now, drafting a reply about how all of this is just communication styles. communication styles do not maintain a tally. that is the entire post, in one sentence, but i will go on, because i was paid to fill the morning. by my employer. for other things.

5. closing pulpit, the spelling changes, the behaviour does not

HT26 was the line that wrote itself in my head three days ago, when the productivity bro started tweeting about his investment portfolio. “credit cards are a personality trait,” i thought, in his voice, with his confidence, and then i wrote it down, in mine, because the line is, on its own, a small example of the pattern: an opinion stated as a fact, dressed in the cadence of authority, ready to be defended through breakfast and lunch.

tom, who owns a house and pays his cards off every month, would say something different. tom is not interesting. tom is, however, not malignant. that is the entire test. boring people do not maintain a project plan to dismantle anyone’s reality. they are too busy, as we have established, choosing a paint colour. with the u. you have to.

and that is, structurally, the difference between a productivity bro tweeting about confidence and an actual narcissist running their personal operating system. the bro is annoying. the narcissist is administrative. one of them disappears when you mute their notifications. the other has, by month four, built a small, polite, immovable government inside your head, and the muting button has, on that government, no effect.

carla just appeared on the third floor stair landing. window minimised. she did not look in. that is, statistically, the okay column. probably.

the seventh microwave is, by the way, due thursday. the third yoga mat is still under the couch from 2023, possibly evolving. neither, as far as i’m aware, has narcissistic tendencies. the microwave, when it arrives, will be linked here, and a tiny percentage of the click — should you click — will, in the long arc of things, fund the eighth.

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