TIL I'm a narcissist. Not how I expected this morning to go.
I think these kind of categories that come from psychology are useful and also dangerous. Our innate tendency towards heuristics makes it difficult to talk about this stuff, especially with words like "narcissist" that have strongly negative connotations. The brain is a complicated mess. Maybe the most complicated mess in the universe. We try to impose some order on it without understanding it. It's true that "everyone in this room loves me" and "everyone in this room hates me" could be manifestations of a similar neurological configuration, and we could put the label "narcissist" on it. But the label is somewhat arbitrary and the behavioral results are often very different.
I think these kind of categories that come from psychology are useful and also dangerous. Our innate tendency towards heuristics makes it difficult to talk about this stuff, especially with words like "narcissist" that have strongly negative connotations. The brain is a complicated mess. Maybe the most complicated mess in the universe. We try to impose some order on it without understanding it. It's true that "everyone in this room loves me" and "everyone in this room hates me" could be manifestations of a similar neurological configuration, and we could put the label "narcissist" on it. But the label is somewhat arbitrary and the behavioral results are often very different.