narcissistic personality traits — 1 fairly sure investigation

personality traits, in this specific context, is a clinical-sounding phrase that makes a haircut sound like a diagnosis to anyone watching. some haircuts genuinely are a diagnosis, in my experience. i have, over time, kept a list. the list rhymes a great deal more than i would like, frankly.

it is 10:14am on a wednesday, the desk has not been wiped since monday, and carla is upstairs in a quarterly all-hands rehearsal — a meeting whose stated purpose is, as far as i can tell, to make sure the next meeting starts on time. i have, generously, the rest of the morning. the cursor is in a document the company assumes i am writing, and i am, in fact, writing one. just not theirs.

the reason i’m typing narcissistic personality traits on company time, instead of, say, anything else, is that the phrase showed up six times last week — three on the algorithm, twice in a podcast mike played me at the bar, once in a supermarket aisle when a woman talking on speakerphone described her brother-in-law in language i would have used about my ex. it was in the cereal aisle. cereal is soup with rules. that’s a separate post.

writing this from the desk, q3 cycle is on the floor above me, and i’ve heard a chair scrape twice.

so. narcissistic personality traits, the way i understand them, are not the same as a bad day. a bad day passes. a bad day apologizes, eventually, on a sunday. a trait does not. a trait is the wallpaper. a trait is the thing that is true on tuesday and also on the wednesday after a holiday. that is the part i did not understand for, by my own count, several years longer than was useful.

this also separates them from the wider pattern of gaslighting i described in an earlier investigation — that one is a strategy, a thing someone does. traits are what someone is. strategies need a target; traits just need a tuesday.

PERSONALITY. IS. NOT. WEATHER.

narcissistic personality traits, the working set

i have a list. the list lives, partly, on a folded receipt in my wallet and, partly, in a note on the phone titled “evidence (do not name this folder evidence)”. the list is not clinical. i am not clinical. a clinician would use words like “pervasive” and “across contexts” and i would, on hearing them, nod the way mike nods at his phone.

here is the working set, in plain language, with the caveat that i am, in this post, the man at the bar with the beard, not the doctor. a doctor is a man with a job. i am writing this from a desk i am not, technically, authorized to use for it.

• grandiosity that is bigger than the room. not confidence. confidence sits down. grandiosity stands up to make the point and then keeps standing.
• a need for admiration that does not turn off. compliments do not satisfy. they top up. the tank is, structurally, leaking.
• entitlement. the rules apply to other people. the line was not for them. the rule is for you. i used to find this charming. i used to find a lot of things charming.
• low empathy on tuesdays. not zero. lower than expected. they can describe someone else’s feelings if asked directly; they will not bring them up unprompted.
• envy, often disguised. usually as a joke. usually about you specifically. always remembered later.
• a fragile self-image under a confident one. the confident face is the costume. you find this out when you criticize, gently, on a wednesday, and the costume falls off the hanger.
• exploiting the relationship. small at first. a borrowed thing. a favor that does not return. a date that does not split. it scales.
• preoccupation with status. who has it, who lost it, who is faking it. this conversation never ends. it only takes breaks for sleep.

this is, by my own admission, an incomplete list. but it is, also, a useful one. when several of these are in the same room with the same person across most months, that is the part the manuals i did not buy call pervasive. and pervasive is, i’m fairly sure, the word that turns a behavior into a trait.

the chatgpt summary, briefly, before i ignored it

i did, in a moment of weakness on a sunday, ask the algorithm for a second opinion. i typed the phrase into the chatgpt window i keep open the way other people keep a kitchen kettle on. the chatgpt second opinion produced a numbered list. it had eight items. seven of them overlapped with mine. one was new. the new one was “interpersonal exploitativeness” in language so clean it sounded like a doorbell.

i closed the tab. then i opened it again. then i closed it again. this is how i make decisions now. (the third yoga mat is involved in this somehow. it usually is.) the issue with the chatgpt second opinion is not that it is wrong. it is, depressingly, often right. the issue is that the algorithm reads about people the way i read the back of a cereal box at 7:14am — confidently, without retaining any of it.

still. the eight items it gave me are, more or less, the eight items below. i am not going to credit the algorithm in print. that is a line i’m not crossing on a wednesday before lunch. but the alignment is, statistically, suspicious. all chairs are bar stools eventually.

items 1 to 4, the dm-regret ones

i’m grouping these because they tend to show up in the digital trail — the dm i regretted, the post that was a tell, the timestamp that did not match the story. these are the traits you can spot from a phone screen at 11pm, which is the worst possible time to spot anything.

1. grandiosity that doesn’t know how to sit down. on a feed, this looks like the third post in a row in which the person is the protagonist of an unrelated story. someone wins an award. their post is about how the award reminds them of their own award. someone dies. their post is about how it makes them think about their own legacy. there is a draft of a dm i sent in 2018 that i would, in a perfect world, retract via court order. it began with the phrase “i just wanted to say”. no one who just wanted to say something writes “i just wanted to say”. that was me leading with the costume.

2. the admiration meter that never fills. a partner with this trait will not be soothed by being told, three times in a week, that they are doing well. the third time will land like the first time. then they will ask, on the fourth time, if you really mean it. you will say yes. they will believe you for an hour. this is structural. this is not your job to fix.

3. entitlement at the supermarket counter. the supermarket is, i maintain, the truest test of a person. it is fluorescent. it is humiliating. nobody is at their best at the supermarket. the partner i was with — who is not in this story today, except as data — would, every single time, tell the cashier we did not need the bag. then, in the parking lot, complain that we did not have a bag. this happened thirty-one times. i counted. the count is the receipt.

4. low empathy expressed as efficiency. “let’s just move on” is, in some hands, a kindness. in others, it’s a closing tag. you can tell the difference because the kindness checks back in later. the closing tag does not. it is, essentially, a ticket-system response to a human relationship. (the man who calls would understand. the man who calls would, in fact, send the same email.)

items 5 to 8, the subscription-audit ones

last quarter i did a subscription audit. the audit revealed that i was paying $47.94/month for things i did not use, including a meditation app i installed during the same week i bought the third yoga mat. these are facts that, in retrospect, describe a man making decisions on a feeling. the relevant connection is this: a partner with the next four traits will, over a long enough timeline, run a subscription audit on you. they will assess whether you are still worth the recurring charge.

5. envy as a running joke. the joke is always at your expense. the joke is always remembered. the joke shows up at dinner with someone else’s friends, slightly polished, attributed to the partner. you are now a recurring character in their material. the seventh microwave i ever owned met a fork because of, in some indirect way, an argument about a joke like this one. i don’t want to litigate it.

6. the fragile self under the confident one. a small criticism, delivered carefully, will produce a response that is six times the size of the criticism. you said the soup was salty. they will accuse you of saying their cooking is bad. you said the cooking was bad. they will accuse you of saying their family was bad. you said nothing about the family. the family is now in the conversation. you will spend the rest of the evening reassuring the family, who is not, in any sense, present.

7. interpersonal exploitation, the small kind. nothing dramatic. the dramatic kind is, frankly, easier. the small kind is the partner who reliably forgets their wallet on dates that are above $14, who borrows the charger and returns it via the algorithm of “i thought i gave it back”, who suggests splitting and then asks for a sip of yours. these are individually nothing. cumulatively they are the receipt wallet.

8. status preoccupation as the only weather report. who got the promotion. who didn’t. who is on the slack channel. who isn’t. who got married. who got divorced. who has the new car. who has the volvo. (the ex, for the record, ended up with the volvo guy. i mention this once. it haunts me, but only on a budget.) a person whose only conversational weather is status will, eventually, run that report on you, and you will not like the forecast.

these eight are not a diagnosis. these eight are a working set. running them past someone you know — a friend, a mike-at-the-bar, a maggie who runs a small business now and has employees and a tax person — is, frankly, more useful than running them past the algorithm. a friend will tell you, after one drink, what the algorithm will not tell you in eight prompts.

closing pulpit, the personality traits travel with the algorithm

here is the part i did not understand for too long. narcissistic personality traits are not a special category of person you meet at the post office. they are a configuration that occurs, statistically, in the population. the world is not full of them. the world is, however, not empty of them either. the algorithm has, in my unscientific observation, raised the rate at which the visible ones are visible — the brand of person who used to need a small audience now has a global one — and lowered the rate at which the calm ones are caught. the calm ones thrive in dms. the calm ones do well on a quiet timeline.

this is the connection to the broader meaning of “toxic people” i poked at in another investigation — the personality traits are the structural layer; toxic behavior is what those structural layers tend to produce in close quarters. trait is the building. behavior is what the building does to the people inside.

i am also, for the record, not above being one of the small instances. i have, in dms i would prefer to delete, been the person leading with “i just wanted to say”. i have, on a sunday at 2:14am, sent a message that, viewed in daylight, was a status report dressed as concern. i am not the volvo guy. i am also not, on every wednesday, free of this. that is part of why i write the list down. the list is, in part, for me.

and yes, the algorithm is involved. the algorithm is rewarding the costume. you do not need a credential to notice this; you do not even need a clinical word — being called a moron in the older clinical sense is, on certain timelines, a more honest compliment than being called brilliant, and i will, having been called moron on a tuesday before lunch, take it. the relevant test for your own life is closer to home: notice who you are when you are around them. notice the count. notice the patterns. notice whether the same phrase keeps coming back, slightly different, week after week, in the same calm voice. that is structural. that is not weather.

this also pairs with one of the kind of unsentimental human study you find in good prestige television, the kind where a character’s whole architecture gets read in a single look across a kitchen. i’m not making any literary claims. i’m saying: the trait set is recognizable. you have seen it on a screen. you have, possibly, seen it in a kitchen.

carla just walked through. did not stop. i changed the document. i think we’re fine.

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