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

[skurkey.livejournal.com]

I agree. I think self-absorbed people also fail to listen to what you say to them.

[tamidon.livejournal.com]

Self-absorbed,or they assume that you read and memorise their lj posts

[gravitrue.livejournal.com]

I am so tempted to post a completely irrelevant story about myself here. But I'd be afraid people wouldn't get it.

[twilight-tea.livejournal.com]

I need to quote this.

[amelia-g.livejournal.com]

I don't think this is necessarily a self-absorbed thing, so much as a limited world thing.

For example, although I generally prefer to shoot "real" people who actually do something cool and just want their picture taken, every once in a blue moon, I will photograph someone from the generally icky 818 Valley video smut industry. I am NOT a part of that industry. It is very rare that I find anyone who IS a part of that industry compelling enough to want to photograph them. Nonetheless, that world is so insular that the few people I have photographed from it freaking ALWAYS assume that I know everyone they know and know who they are dating and where they live and who is hard to work with and all sorts of business details. They just have such limited existences most of the time that, on the rare occasions where they venture beyond that world, they just have trouble shifting their conversational pattern to footnote properly.

Then again, members of my family tend to repeat stories really a lot and I know I sometimes don't want to tell someone a story twice, so I will end up not telling them at all. Not exactly the same thing though, I guess.

[stolen-tea.livejournal.com]

Not to justify, because I know some people who are *Just Like That*, but isn't lack of awareness of the boundary between self and other a common feature of autism? That is, there are a lot of child studies showing that young children and the autistic tend to assume that other people know everything that they themselves know. Which sort makes me wonder whether that sort of behavior can be produced by some sort of emotional regression, and if it's possible to lose social acuity and fall backwards into early childhood.

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.