Sometimes I feel as if I can hear my spine sagging under the weight of all the lives I don’t live.
Jonathan Foer. Eerily loud and forbiddingly close.
The feeling that life is passing me by is almost the most common complaint of narcissists. That said, I notice that different experiences are described depending on one’s age. When I’m young, the narcissistic anxiety about it looks something like, “Life is passing me by and I haven’t accomplished/achieved anything yet.” Literally every minute inside the narcissist is put on the counter. I’m not kidding! Once you have a free, unfulfilled moment, the anxiety intensifies. And it really is an exhausting feeling.
To not feel it, we seem to fill our lives to the limit, going to personal growth trainings and various courses. Almost every hour of our time we force ourselves to live efficiently and full. And this is not an exaggeration. If we have a free minute, we turn on another lecture and do something useful in the household. On the way to work, we listen to popular audiobooks. And when we walk with the baby, sitting on the bench, we read the world’s media to keep up with the latest news.
Once upon a time there lived a Little Narcissus.
She was responsible for three jobs and did a hundred and one things at the same time.
Narcissus was getting very tired. And the anxious bustle kept getting bigger and bigger. And that was not a bad thing at all.
Because it was precisely this bustle that did not allow Narcissus to linger even for a moment and understand who she was and why she was making such a frantic activity instead of her life.
And if she had stopped, she might have been frightened.
The size of the emptiness in her soul and the number of tears of unlived moments.
Like many, I, too, was at one point completely taken over by the narcissistic idea that not one minute should go to waste. Otherwise, a panic-stricken terror of wasted time enveloped me. Only continuous effective and rewarding activities calmed my anxiety.
In the second half of life, the narcissist already looked around, ran through all the “glades” of life where he could or could not achieve something. He had looked at how and what people could live. He was already trying to satiate himself with things and outward trappings. He was going after other people’s goals, socially fitting in, achieving or, conversely, stagnating in procrastination and sabotage.
And so he comes in and talks about another experience of “life passing him by. He suddenly discovers that many things are beyond his reach. It turns out that even those who are less fortunate can be happier and more satisfied with life.
How is that possible? He tried so hard to become more perfect and successful. He thought he would take complete control of life this way and that would be happiness. He did everything right, and now he is persistently looking for the button: where to turn on the pleasure of life? But he has no luck at all. It turns out that neither power, nor success, nor money gives automatic access to where joy and happiness are.
Narcissus is focused on the outward signs of image: career, success, winning the competition, endless development, appearance.
And it is almost unreal for him to experience those simple feelings that other people call pleasure and life itself. The very essence of narcissism is contrary to the living, because it consists in the ability to interrupt one’s urges and control them.
Where other people enter into relationships, feeding and nourishing each other’s energy, the narcissist can neither give nor take. It is the same in a relationship with an occupation. He can choose to do the right thing, the useful thing, the effective thing, but not the thing he loves and enjoys.
In the journey to pleasure, the narcissist will have to learn a simple thing. In the first half of life, we are looking for the answer to the question of what we must become in order for life to be successful. And in the second half, we need to figure out how being who we are can better live our own lives.
Exercise
Perhaps by reading to this page, you may already be noticing important things that already make up your life. Maybe you can see the tenderness in your relationship with your spouse, the care your friends have for you, the attention of others to what’s going on with you. Perhaps you can already sense what is important and valuable about you beyond the accomplishments you demand of yourself. I really hope that you can already look around you even a little bit to notice who is around you and what your relationships are full of. What experiences make up the fabric of your relationship? What does each day of your life consist of right now? What are the feelings it is filled with? Isn’t this your real life that is already going on and won’t happen again?
The key to the exercise
The key is very simple…
Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Time Shake, “My uncle Alex Vonnegut … taught me a very simple but really important thing. He said that somehow we don’t notice when good things happen. But good things are worth paying attention to. He talked not about some great accomplishments, but about the simplest, everyday things: when you drink lemonade on a hot afternoon in the shade, or suddenly you smell fresh bread from the bakery, or are sitting catching fish, and you do not care whether you catch something or not, or hear someone playing the piano really great somewhere in the neighboring house. Uncle Alex used to tell me that in moments of such epiphanies, you have to say out loud and with feeling: “This is great, isn’t it?”
Summary
I hope you can now visualize more clearly the image of the deficient narcissist. And perhaps you’ve seen some of the puzzles within yourselves.
Let me remind you again. The deficit narcissist:
- Feels empty;
- devalues what would make him feel valuable;
- sets himself unattainable ideals;
- cannot get enough of any achievements, because they always “fall short”;
- Is gripped by anxiety about his own inadequacy and deficiency, refusing to see what he possesses;
- cannot enjoy his or her life and be satisfied with what he or she is doing;
- suffers from boredom, meaninglessness and hopelessness because he cannot make his life interesting for himself.
The famous Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler described this problem in the following words: “The neurotic’s life question sounds not “What must I do in order to adapt to the demands of society and thereby achieve a harmonious existence?” but “How must I organize my life in order to satisfy my desire for superiority, to turn my constant feeling of inferiority into a feeling of godlikeness?” In other words, the only point established or fixed in thought is the attainment of a personal ideal. In order to approach a sense of godhood, the neurotic makes a tendentious assessment of his individuality, his experiences, and his environment.”
It must be admitted that we are in many ways afflicted by this narcissistic neurosis. And that we run away from our human reality by demanding of ourselves an unbelievable and unattainable image of our self. The reality is that we are not so bad. But compared to perfection and perfection we are, of course, utterly insignificant, bad, and always insufficient. Of course, we have our reasons for being so resistant to the childlike sense of inadequacy that often grips children who feel ashamed of their limitations next to strong and intelligent adults. But the ways in which we do this exhaust us and exhaust us more than they help to raise and strengthen our self-esteem in any way.
Fragments from the forthcoming book “Fragile People: A Secret Door to the World of Narcissists”