characteristics of a narcissist man explained — 1 brief investigation

characteristics of the male version of this category is a phrase that took me a year to be able to type without feeling like i was being unfair to roughly half of the population. i am being fair. half of the population can relax.

the elevator on the way up to the third floor is slow enough this morning that a man in a quarter-zip and a wireless headset has time to explain his morning routine to me, unsolicited, between floor two and floor four, which is itself a characteristic worth logging.

i’m at the desk now. carla is up in the annual planning meeting on the third floor. i have, give or take, a clean ninety minutes before someone needs a deck, which is exactly enough to type out an inventory i have been keeping in my head, off and on, since the elevator door closed at 10:51am.

1. characteristics of a narcissist man, the working list

let me say it plainly and you can underline it if you want a souvenir. the characteristics of a narcissist man, in my fairly sure investigation of the species, do not show up in dramatic gestures. they show up in the small, repeated choices a person makes when they assume nobody is keeping score.

i am keeping score. that is not a flex, that is a coping mechanism with a notebook attached to it. the inventory i’m about to lay out comes from two sources: the productivity bro from the elevator, and stefan, who has been a wine man at every dinner i have attended in the last eleven months and is, statistically, the reason i started the inventory in the first place.

before we go further, the broader behavioral pattern that holds these eight items together is the one i already wrote about at length in the manual on how reality gets gently rearranged in conversation, which is the pillar everything in this cluster orbits around. i’ll only nod to it here, because the elevator monologue is the actual subject and the elevator monologue does not need a ninety-minute lecture to identify itself.

for context, i have already mapped how a particular generation of fathers operationalized this same toolkit at home, which is the same playbook on a domestic timeline. the man in the elevator is a younger model of that same machine, with a wireless headset instead of a recliner, and a slightly worse posture.

2. the elevator where the productivity bro showed up on a timeline

here is the scene, for the investigation, by which i mean the investigation. 9:18am. lobby. one elevator out of three is working. four of us inside. the man in the quarter-zip pressed three before any of us could say a floor, which is item one and we will get to it.

between floors two and four, this man — who i will call the productivity bro, because that is the species name and i did not invent the species — explained that he wakes at 4:47am, that he does cold plunges, that his calendar is “color-coded for joy,” and that he was, by his own estimate, “ahead of his week” by tuesday morning. tuesday had not, at that point, occurred.

the elevator does not have a comment box. i was making one in my head. by the time the door opened on floor four he had, by the count i keep running in my notebook, used the word “i” twenty-two times in about thirty seconds. nobody asked for the count. the count happened anyway.

the closest pop-culture record of this exact species, for reference, is the brian fantana / ron burgundy ecosystem of the men who narrate themselves at the salad bar, which i submit not as a joke but as evidence that the species has been observable on screen since at least 2004. our species predates the recording, but the recording is what we have.

3. items 1 to 4, the stefan-style ones

these first four are what i think of as the soft characteristics. they look like personality. they read like preferences. they are, on closer reading, an architecture.

1. presses the floor button before anyone else can say a floor. small, almost helpful. it is also the entire personality, compressed. the floor he picks is his floor. the rest of us can ride along.

2. tells you the wine before he asks if you drink. stefan, the wine man, has done this at five separate dinners. there is a bottle, there is a country, there is a soil paragraph. there is no question. the question is not the point. the soil paragraph is.

3. corrects pronunciation when no correction was requested. usually the word is foreign, usually the room already knew, usually the correction is wrong. credit cards are a personality trait, and so, apparently, is the way you say “gnocchi.” both load-bearing.

4. arrives with a story already in progress. the story has no beginning that involves you. the story has a middle that involves a flight, a deal, or a senior person. the story has an end that you are required to laugh at, lightly, on cue.

two of the four — the wine paragraph and the in-progress story — are what i pulled from stefan, who, in the interest of the investigation, also showed up in my notes on the parallel inventory across the aisle, because the species is, for these particular tells, gender-agnostic. the elevator just delivered a male specimen this morning.

4. items 5 to 8, the productivity-bro ones

these next four are what the productivity bro generously demonstrated between floor two and floor four. these are the harder characteristics. they hide under self-improvement vocabulary.

5. announces a routine in the first ninety seconds. wake time, plunge, journal, gym, “the work.” you did not ask. you are now holding it. you will not get a turn.

6. uses “i” as a unit of speech, not a pronoun. twenty-two instances in thirty seconds, by the count i kept running on a notepad. the average elevator conversation, in my unscientific archive, runs four. the ratio is the diagnosis.

7. treats every shared space as a stage with one chair. the elevator. the water cooler. the table. the seventh microwave at the office (which is the seventh i have killed, separately, and is not relevant here except as a counter-example: the microwave does not announce its routine, it just hums and gives up). the third yoga mat under my couch from 2023 is, at this point, more conversational than item seven.

8. files a small grievance about a junior person, unprompted. the productivity bro mentioned, between floors three and four, that “his analyst hasn’t sent the deck.” that was not the elevator’s problem. only a fool, in the older sense, would treat an elevator as the place to file that complaint, and yet here we are. the fool, mind you, would at least know he was the fool. that is the disqualifying difference. the elevator was, however, asked to hold it.

5. closing pulpit, the characteristics are stable, the elevator is slow

the inventory holds, by my notebook, across both elevator and dinner table. stefan-at-the-wine and bro-in-the-quarter-zip are different costumes on the same animal. the costume changes. the floor button gets pressed first. the soil paragraph gets delivered. the analyst gets thrown under the table for free.

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