Narcissism and Validity
Self-obsession, approval-seeking and their alternatives
I’ve been reading a lot of Freddie deBoer lately. As someone who leans towards market socialism but feels uneasy about a lot of mainstream progressivism’s attitude and goals, I find his perspective and bullish style invigorating. I’m incapable of feeling passionately certain about any particular political worldview myself (you’ll notice the “leans towards” above), and even if I were more sure of my takes I couldn’t put them forward in the aggressive, confrontational way Freddie does. But even if the world really does contain as many shades of grey as I see in it, people have to believe things, argue about them with passion, and most importantly, act. That’s how things happen and needles move. No matter where you stand on the political spectrum, people like deBoer make the dialogue way more interesting.
I’ve just read his post “Nobody Walks Around Feeling ‘Valid’” and it sparked a few thoughts in me. Written about the ‘constructs of self-esteem and personal validation that have taken up so much cultural attention lately’, the piece is short and worth reading in its entirety. But this is the part I want to focus on:
[T]here’s an essential way in which being happy is very different from being valid: happiness can come from within, at least theoretically, but being valid always implies some sort of exterior criteria…investing your wellbeing in transitory things you can’t control is a mistake. Of all the toxic and disheartening elements of the internet era, the worst is the way that our concept of human value is so often seen as purely crowdsourced, I think.
Along with the first comment that appears underneath the post, by Substacker Kathleen McCook:
When you take care of something else — a child, a pet, a garden — you don’t feel valid so much as connected to more than yourself. I never worried about my validity while changing a diaper. I never worried about my validity when caring for an old dog. I never worried about my validity when planting flowers. When these thoughts — about my validity — arise in my brain I try to do a task for someone/something else.
As a single person with no children, pets or plants — not so much as a cactus depends on me for life — this one gives me pause. Yes, I have my friends, family, students and collaborators, but a lot of the things I value most don’t involve other people at all. Creating something requires that you spend a lot of time inside your head, listen to what the voices under the surface are trying to tell you, and give them expression as best you can. Both processes — figuring out what you want to say, then saying it — are essentially solitary matters. It’s a very introverted thing.
Crucially, a thing that requires you to find your own thoughts very interesting. I have a loooot to say about the relationship between the arts and narcissism — working up a separate post about it — but for now I’ll just mention that it’s easy to forget how much suffering narcissism causes the narcissist themselves. We tend to think the attitude involves puffing yourself up at others’ expense, but just as often it involves putting yourself down by comparison to them. The point isn’t that you’re thinking egotistical things about yourself, it’s that you’re thinking about yourself in the first place. As your mood and circumstances rise and fall, your self-assessments flip between grandiosity and worthlessness, with the rest of the world nothing but a backdrop to this grand drama that’s playing out from moment to moment.
The major problem with this way of thinking is that it’s extremely boring. Rather than being open to people and things in themselves, narcissism constantly views them as they relate to the ego. What do I think of them? How do I judge them in relation to myself? How do I judge myself in relation to them? Is this person better than me (the shame!) or worse (the pride!)? How can they serve me? Can I use them in some way to get where I want to go? Exhausting stuff.
Just as some who are given to narcissism habitually occupy the pride end of the spectrum and others spend more time on the shame end, some are more extroverted in their approach and others more introverted. The extroverts are people-focused, but find it hard to form genuine connections with others. The introverts prefer their own company, and may regard others as too intimidating to be around (shame) or too boring to be worth paying attention to (pride). Both are troubled by feelings of emptiness, with extroverts using other people to plug up the imagined hole, and introverts often preferring ideas, passions or hobbies. (Some even use religion, which is where the infamous “spiritual bypass” phenomenon comes in.)
What all these shades of narcissism share in common is insecurity. This goes along with a hypersensitivity to others’ opinions, which are always threatening to topple the self-perception narcissism works so hard to construct and maintain. This artificial construction is what Buddhists mean by the “ego”: a small-I sense of self that doesn’t have any concrete existence, but spends every minute of every day telling you it does because it believes that’s the only way it can keep you safe in a terrifying world.
Like any illusion, the ego is a fragile beast. Its existence is predicated on fear, and the more energy you give it the more insecure and paranoid you become. So you get the paradox that the people who seem the most cocksure are often the most easily wounded, wildly overreacting to even the mildest of perceived criticisms, and the people who seem the most full of themselves feel the strongest need to keep proving themselves over and over.
The flipside of this is that many highly sensitive self-doubters are secretly grandiose. Constant self-criticism is usually felt to be more morally worthy than constant self-praise, but both involve overdramatic navel-gazing, an over-investment in your own story. And if arrogance frequently causes you to overstep the mark and do things you shouldn’t, self-doubt often prevents you from doing anything, which does neither you nor society any favours. (Naturally, this becomes yet another stick for we HSPs to beat ourselves with!) Meanwhile, that grandiose voice deep down whispers to you that if you were doing something, you’d be doing it better than that overrated idiot. Not a fun way to live.
I don’t mean any of this to sound judgemental. We all have egos, which means we’re all affected by narcissism to some degree. As a musician and writer, I’m probably affected by it to a greater degree than most. And those who suffer from it most of all didn’t choose their personalities, so there’s no point judging them either.
I will admit that exposure to high doses of narcissism upsets me, though. Maybe it’s because of my home environment growing up. Maybe it’s because the parts of me that are passive and empathic have made me an easy target for manipulators over the years, and I’ve had to end a few friendships after getting burned. Or maybe it’s because I see my own narcissism reflected back to me in the behaviour of other people who find their personal narratives as fascinating as I all too often find mine. I’m bothered by how much of my own day is taken up with worrying about personal problems that only exist to the extent that I think about them. By the hypnotic force of repetitive, circular thought patterns I know full well are a waste of time.
Whatever the reason, I resent it when people consider themselves too interesting to be interrupted but won’t listen in return. I feel a sense of futility when a conversation partner keeps wrenching the subject back to themselves rather than following on from the last thing I said. And I get legitimately uneasy when I hear open mic performers say they’re out to change the world, or fellow songwriters tell me they consider their work some of the greatest of all time. Sure, there’s a funny side to that level of opinion-reality disconnect. But I confess I also find the human capacity for self-delusion genuinely disturbing. If these people are fooling themselves to that extent, what am I fooling myself about?
But the saddest part for me is the smallness of the narcissism I see in myself and others. I’ll catch myself drifting when someone’s telling me about a passion that animates them, or watch myself repeatedly steer a conversation back to the same handful of cherished ambitions instead of letting the back-and-forth go where it naturally wants to go, and I’ll start to feel like I’m trapped inside a little box. ‘You already know what your own summer plans are,’ I’ll think to myself. ‘Do you have to keep hearing yourself repeat them? Why not take the chance to escape from your own story for a while and learn something new about the world?’
Sometimes at a choir rehearsal I’ll suddenly be struck by just how much I’m experiencing the event from inside my own head. Instead of being relaxed, present, part of the unfolding scene around me, I’m thinking about the last wrong note I hit or the next wrong note I might hit or how tired I am or how little writing I got done earlier or when I’ll get to go home or how I’m going to manage in work tomorrow. Anxious, small, and above all dull thoughts that cut me off from the exquisite simplicity of what’s actually going on: a group of friendly amateurs have come together to have a good time singing pop songs, and I’m facilitating that by accompanying them.
Ultimately, self-obsession shrinks the vast, wonderful cosmos down to the size of your fears. Infinite complexity and beauty, endless realms to explore, all flattened into a repetitive inner monologue that constantly chews over things no-one else gives a damn about. You could be thinking about the mystery of creation or the paradox of self-consciousness, and instead you’re fretting about your back pain for the millionth time this hour. It’s not that you’re wrong to find your own story interesting. But you haven’t taken that crucial step back that allows you to find it merely as interesting as everything else in the universe — no more and no less.
Kind of a shame, isn’t it?
To tie things back to Freddie’s post, I see the relentless pursuit of validity as the logical consequence of insecurity-fuelled narcissism. The more cocksure version of this involves proclaiming your greatness in a way that compels others to agree; the more self-doubting version consists of outright asking people to validate you, or putting yourself down in the hopes other people will build you back up. All these approaches share the common goal of getting affirmation from others instead of yourself.
So if grandiosity and insecurity share common DNA, then what’s the opposite of both of them? For me, the answer is peace. Insecurity looks within, sees only the small, frightened ego, says ‘This isn’t enough’, and turns to the outside world to bolster the self as much as possible. Peace looks within, sees the vastness of the universe distilled into a single human experience, says ‘This is all there is’, and realises it doesn’t need anything from the outside world at all — that there isn’t even an “outside” world in the first place. You, me, this and that are all the same thing.
I think this way of framing things resolves a seeming contradiction between Freddie’s point (‘happiness can come from within, at least theoretically, but being valid always implies some sort of exterior criteria’) and Kathleen’s (‘When these thoughts — about my validity — arise in my brain I try to do a task for someone/something else’). On first glance, it looks like Kathleen’s talking about getting happiness from others and Freddie’s talking about not getting it from others.
The key word in Kathleen’s sentence is for. If you have a happiness that comes from within, that frees you up to engage with the external world in the role of benefactor. But if you’re seeking validity from without, that means you’re not giving to the world but taking from it. The insecure person is in the world for what they can get from it, because they think they need something they don’t already have. But the peaceful person is in the world to share their peace with everyone they meet — to help other people realise that, ultimately, they don’t need any more love or connection than they already possess just by virtue of being alive.
Insecurity assumes a void and uses everything and everyone to fill it; peace’s cup runneth over, splashing over everything within a few feet of it. No matter how much the insecure person engages with others, their focus is always on themselves. And no matter how much time the peaceful person spends alone, they always feel connected to everyone else. That’s why they say that meditation is a form of action: it’s impossible for your actions to convey the right intentions, and achieve the right results, if they don’t start from the right position. Get your sense of self in order, and the quality of your efforts improves automatically.
So, the bad news is that the vast majority of us walk around perpetually thinking about our “small selves”. Because we know deep down just how small they are, we constantly use the people we meet to big them up so they’ll be more attractive places for us to spend all our time. This strategy works in the short term, but doesn’t cure us over the long term. If it did we wouldn’t need to keep using it.
The good news is that the small self is an illusion, and so is the perception that it’s a bottomless pit that we have to keep slinging the approval of others into. Our validity comes from one thing, and one thing alone: we’re here. We’re alive. As such, we have something to offer the world. And as Kathleen points out, the best way to make that contribution is to get out of our own way, take the focus off the small self that doesn’t even exist, and get on with living.
This was an excellent piece! thank you for sharing, in the east, the wise say something similar along the lines, the true self within has everything that you need, every being is complete and doesn't need anything else to be whole.
very inspiring thoughts and superbly said. I especially like the sentence "Ultimately, self-obsession shrinks the vast, wonderful cosmos down to the size of your fears."