More thoughts on the self-absorbed.

[randomness]

Self-absorbed people have a tendency to launch into conversation about themselves assuming you already know key points about themselves that they have never told you. This more often happens when they're seeing you again after some absence. It never occurs to them that you wouldn't know, because it's so important and obvious to them. This can make conversations with them confusing.

Sometimes, they get offended at you for not knowing things they haven't told you, because your not knowing them means you clearly didn't care enough to pay attention to things they didn't tell you. But this is a somewhat more extreme case.

(Thanks to cmeckhardt for helpful changes in wording.)

Comments

I understand!

[progscholar.livejournal.com]

I don't comment on this LJ much, but this thread really touched a nerve with me. In the academy, humanists and humanistic social scientists work alone, and the giant pressure to produce makes tedious people into narcissists and narcissists into black holes of self-absorption. I know one person whose head is so far up her ass that it comes back out her mouth. Where I live, this institutional pressure to obsess on oneself is fostered by the local environment. I live in a college town in the South, and there is nothing to do here but work; people are either working frantically to get out, or they are happy here because there are no distractions from work. The result--more narcissism. (Actually, there are two other obsessions here--church and kids. Being a childless atheist, these options aren’t relevant to me. That is another story, though.) I wonder if other kinds of social forces lead increased self-absorption.