It was 15C spring weather in New York this week and my timeline was full of pictures of daffodils and checklists on how to spot and deal with a narcissist. I feel as if we go through this every few years: a condition, vaguely defined, emerges as the focus of a million quizzes and pop psych columns that encourage us to diagnose those who displease us.
For ages it was being “on the spectrum”. It didn’t matter what that “spectrum” was – and in its popular usage, it had nothing to do with the medical definitions of autism – but everyone who had ever annoyed us was on it. You could identify them by their use of nonsequiturs or some aspect of their body language, or by their unwillingess to share, and you could deal with them by terminating your friendship. After that, I think, there was the era of borderline personality disorder, and then a surge in the perennially popular and interchangeable conditions of sociopathy and psychopathy.
These days, it is narcissism. Ten Ways To Tell If You’re Involved With a Narcissist is a pleasant way to kill a few minutes, before moving on to Is Your Best Friend an Emotional Vampire? – to which the answer is probably yes. The criteria in these quizzes tend, for obvious reasons, to be broad enough to cover every behavioural trait from standard issue bastardry to trapped gas, and if you try hard enough you can apply them to anyone.
It is not hard to understand their appeal. When you fall out with someone, how satisfying to “diagnose” them not only as bad but as pathologically malignant. The advice, too, is gratifying. Short of termination, you are always encouraged to “reset your boundaries”, for which read: don’t feel guilty about diverting calls or not responding to text messages for three days or simply sulking and refusing to talk. After all, you don’t want to enable – you learned that this morning when you took the quiz Are You an Enabler?
Of course, in this era of selfies and social media updates, narcissism may genuinely be on the rise, or else it has always run rampant and only recently found universal expression. Just this week I identified two narcissists and a drama queen, one of whom I had never even met, but whose posts on Facebook ticked every box.
Luckily, I knew what to do. Not block her, obviously, but – as per How To Deal With the Drainers In Your Life – stand back with my arms folded, silently judging, then take a quiz to confirm I am right.
Lose the Groupon gags
I tried to use a rideshare app this week, and the service was temporarily unavailable due to a technical hitch their end. The break-in-service announcement appeared in a text bubble on my phone: “Sorry we can’t help! Our servers have probably popped out for a macchiato!”
I don’t mind a bit of tone. But the relentless effort to inject personality into the conveyance of neutral information is exhausting, a never-ending thumbs-up-for-the-camera that has the opposite to its intended effect: gig economy capitalism posing as jaunty, anti-corporate joie de vivre.
I blame Groupon, the ads for which always used to labour under the delusion that people might be willing to sign up for a six-week trapeze course because they found a joke in the trail to their liking. Now, every passing announcement comes dressed in an outsize clown costume written by a depressed intern or a suicidal copy-writer with nothing to go on.
Macchiato madness
If the rideshare’s server had, in fact, popped out for a macchiato, it would have faced a dizzying array of options. At my local Starbucks, the list of milk possibilities includes coconut milk, almond milk, soy milk, regular milk, skimmed milk, and half and half – insistence on at least two of which can be cross-referenced with definitions of narcissism.
Meanwhile, if you’re sugar-free you have to drink your coffee black, and if you’re still paleo you shouldn’t even be in here.
