narcissist stare — 1 thorough investigation

the stare is a real thing. i did not know it was a real thing until somebody on the internet described it and i sat up too fast and bumped my head on a kitchen cabinet. there is a stare. there is, regrettably, a stare.

so here we are. wednesday, 3:14pm, and i’m typing this from my desk while the third floor swallows carla into a budget thing she said would be “thirty minutes, tops” two hours ago. i have, optimistically, the rest of the morning before anyone notices the brightness of my screen.

i want to be honest about my qualifications. i am not a doctor. i am not a man with a clipboard. i’m a guy who saw a phrase on the internet, recognized the phrase from a person i used to know, and sat down to investigate the phrase the way a man with limited training investigates a noise in his ceiling — with confidence and a flashlight that does not work.

1. narcissist stare, the disclaimer about visual things

visual claims about people are tricky. a stare can be a stare. a stare can also be a person trying to remember if they left the oven on. a stare can be a person who needs glasses. the difference between “this person is doing the narcissist stare” and “this person cannot read the menu” is, sometimes, an eye exam.

that said, there is a category of stare the internet has been describing for years and the rest of us have been describing for longer with worse vocabulary. an old TV detective would call it “the look.” my mom would call it “that face he makes.” the stare predates the term. the term is just a useful handle.

if you want the dictionary version, the word stare goes back to old english starian, “to look fixedly,” a definition that has not changed in a thousand years because, evidently, looking fixedly at people has not gone out of fashion. the broader topic of being made to doubt your own eyes belongs to manufactured doubt and the people who run on it, which i wrote earlier and refer to often when this kind of question shows up.

2. the dmv line where stares are abundant

lines are where a person can practice looking at strangers without consequence, which is why lines are full of stares. the post office line. the dmv line. the supermarket where the woman ahead of me is paying for thirty-eight items in coupons and the cashier has the patience of a man who has accepted the universe.

i went to the dmv last month for a thing i will not describe because describing it means admitting i let it lapse. forty-one people ahead of me. counting is what i do when i cannot use my phone, because my phone was at 19% and i was not going to be the man who runs out of battery in a government building.

in that line i was stared at twice. once by a woman holding a small dog in a tote bag, who i think was just admiring my coat. once by a man with a folder, who, i now believe, was doing what we are calling the narcissist stare — flat, unblinking, eyes locked on a point that was vaguely my forehead. he did not look away when i looked back. he did not soften. he simply continued. i thought about the unopened mail pile waiting at home — three envelopes red, two from a bank app i do not open — and decided he was not the most pressing thing happening to me.

3. the productivity bro thread on this, briefly

last week the productivity bro online, who i refuse to name, posted a thread of seventeen tweets explaining the narcissist stare to his audience. he called it “alpha eye contact.” he called it a “frame control” technique. he said you should practice it in mirrors. he attached a graphic. the graphic had arrows.

i would like to say, with the calm of a man who has killed seven microwaves, that practicing the narcissist stare in your mirror is the single most embarrassing thing you can do with a thursday evening. you are not building frame. you are building a habit of looking weird at strangers in elevators. you’ll forget you’re doing it and your dental hygienist will think you’re sending a message.

here is what the productivity bro got right, in fairness, because i am trying to be fair: a fixed gaze is socially heavy. people respond to it. they often respond by becoming uncomfortable, which a certain kind of person mistakes for respect. and here is what he got wrong: discomfort is not respect. discomfort is the body asking the room a question. respect is when the body relaxes and chooses to stay.

4. the stare in maggie context vs the toms-phone-dodged context

i think about maggie sometimes. maggie who runs a small business now, with employees and payroll. maggie who, in 2019, had three coffees with me in a row and asked, the third time, what i was doing with my life. maggie can hold eye contact long enough that a man across a table will admit to almost any of his choices. that is not the narcissist stare. that is the look of a person who pays for things and expects answers.

now contrast tom. tom calls. i don’t pick up. tom calls again. i still don’t pick up. tom owns a house and a wife and two children and a volvo and the moral high ground of the man who picks up phones. tom looks at you with the warm, slightly-pitying eye contact of someone who genuinely wants to know how you are and is going to be disappointed by your answer. opposite of the stare.

and then there is the third category. the man with the folder at the dmv. cold. flat. unmotivated. either a person practicing alpha eye contact from a thread, or a person whose life had broken in a particular way that left him unable to break a gaze. neither is a system to copy. going somewhere unfamiliar and reading the locals badly is its own genre — i covered it when i wrote about being a slightly stupid tourist. an idiot abroad cannot read the room, cannot read the eyes in the room, and most of the time the eyes in the room are not doing what you think.

5. verdict, the stare is real, the meaning is contextual

so. the verdict, which is overstating it, but i’ll call it a verdict because a man should commit.

the stare is real. people do it. some are running a small experiment on you in their head and want to see what happens when the social rules go silent. some are tired, distracted, thinking about lunch, and their face has settled into a neutral that we, as a culture, have decided to find threatening. and some watched a thread by a man with a graphic and arrows and decided to try it on a wednesday at the dmv.

the rule i would write on a napkin, if anyone in this office had one: showers over 4 minutes are theatre. i bring this up because it is the same kind of rule. some things are real. their meaning depends entirely on who is doing them, why, and whether they got the idea from a thread. the stare is one of those things. you can build a whole life out of refusing to take it at face value.

if you want pop-culture homework, watch any episode of a serious show about men holding gazes for too long and count the seconds. even the trained ones can only really do four. anything longer is a person who has lost the thread of what they were doing.

↑