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If you search up the word Narcissism on Google you'll find something along the lines of this:

selfishness, involving a sense of entitlement, a lack of empathy, and a need for admiration, as characterizing a personality type.

Which is fair considering that when we think of a narcissist we think of that scene from American Psycho where Patrick Bateman is flexing in the mirror whilst railing some sex workers. Just me? Ok maybe you didn't have that exact same scene in mind but you get the point - Narcissism gets a bad rep. Maybe it's because we associate the word narcissism with an excess of all selfish characteristics so a narcissist in everyone's mind is a Joker type character.

What if we 'de-extremify' the characteristics associated with Narcissism. What happens when you move this narcissistic 'slider' around a bit? Well if you slide it all the way down, you get a man who's devoid of all ego, all confidence, all self-esteem which makes him socially lost. Move the slider all the way up and the Patrick Bateman, Joker, Voldemort, Piers Morgan type characters. So evidently we need to a balance between these two sides, ideally somewhere in the middle. But I'd argue that were leaning increasingly to the left side of this spectrum.

We as human require love and approval, we want to be liked, we want to mean something to someone else because it gives a sense of belonging in the world. Without love, we lose our place in the world, we develop 'narcissistic wounds' - a feeling of profound incompetence to some aspect such as status, looks or intelligences. When a person is wounded they are extremely sensitive to anything that even mentions their supposed weakness, they'll be distrustful of any attempt to help and they'll simultaneously ignore the existence of this wound consciously therefore having no interest to repair it. They'll see themselves as a victim without grasping the root cause of the issue. What's even worse is that it becomes a death cycle, people who are wounded have a tendency to inflict wounds on others and the cycle goes on and on and on. That cycle is going and going constantly to this day.

Why can't we have nice things.

Our environment these days is very sensitive to the most minute of incidents, you can spend your entire life building a reputation for yourself but it seems to only take one thing, regardless of its truthfulness, to send the whole thing crashing down. Lemme give you an example. People go to the gym to primarily work on themselves right? Not so fast. Nowadays people to the gym, thanks to TikTok, to farm viral clips of themselves being a victim of alleged gym weirdos. Now obviously there are weirdos that go to the gym but more frequently these so called 'weirdos' upon further inspection are doing nothing out the ordinary. These TikTokers literally film themselves at the gym in an attempt to catch people 'staring', sometimes they even include a stare counter and often times a slight glance that the TikTokers direction warrants an addition to the stare counter.

This type of extreme cynical sensitivity to other's actions is precisely the reason we can't have nice things. If merely glancing at someone's warrants such a reaction what the fuck's gonna happen when I give them a compliment? Am I gonna fucking get crucified?

The result is a world where people are constantly scared so they become fake. So fucking fake. Their failure to recognise these patterns in behaviour lead to cowardice. In our current social dynamic, it takes a certain type of person to have the courage to be nice because they do it knowing that they might just be crucified for it. The bravest people proceed even after acknowledging that there is no insurance or certainty behind their actions.