The modern crisis of the self
Researching and diagnosing all kinds of people in our lives as “narcissists” is all the rage now, with search queries hitting a major inflection point, especially within the video education ecosystem online. I don’t doubt some of the validity here, but while I recognize there are truly pathological versions of narcissism that are worth differentiating from lesser forms, a deeper question has been haunting me for a long time now.
Are we all becoming narcissists?
Part of my approach to this question, which may certainly upset many people—especially and understandably those harmed by what they would call severe narcissistic abuse—is that the things we now have firm psychological, diagnostic terms for are in essence just extreme, cemented kinds of behaviors that, prior to the modern therapeutic fields, were understood primarily through a character-based and spiritual filter.
In this framework, it paints people as all struggling with various forms of sin, defects, and character ugliness, with all succeeding and failing to greater and lesser (and more dramatically good or bad) degrees. Everyone is guilty of or at least regularly tempted by selfishness, greed, envy, lust, pride. How one chooses to live in response to the possibility of vice cements what concoction of these things and their opposite virtues (like generosity, purity, and diligence) form the substrate of the personality.
I think this framework is still incredibly useful, and not necessarily incompatible with a lot of the modern diagnostic pieces.
For one, while it allows for real hope for any soul—a traditional civilizational understanding rooted in either Christian redemption or even just classical Aristotelian habitual patterning—it doesn’t therefore assert this is easy or likely. In Scripture, most people reject the invitation to conversion. In Aristotle’ Ethics, he is clear—and almost in a conundrum in worldview without a clear understanding of divine grace—about the fact that as the habit becomes more deeply entrenched, it requires something almost shocking and violent in order to disrupt the pattern and break its stronghold power.
But that scrap of hope is critical. Yes, people can change, even if they are unlikely to. Certainly those with some of the patterning, perhaps picked up from an abusive narcissistic parent for example but not as entrenched in the hardened habit, have a way out. And all of us who struggle in varying degrees can truly hope to improve and fight for habitual virtue in place of the vice.
But more importantly, and the main substance of this piece, is that we all have a tendency toward narcissistic characteristics, and that the world as it is is drawing us all ever more deeply into that kind of behavior, especially around the effect of digital distraction.
Many of the ills of online life have been perpetually spoken of beyond the point of necessity.
Yes, we become quite easily perverse when living our real lives more for the online presentation it will later offer us rather than the in-the-moment experience itself.
Yes, it is disordered to be constantly awaiting validation via interaction on what we share.
Yes, this perception of infinite options of all kinds but especially in the romantic lane is making many of us incapable of ever choosing and experiencing real and lasting love.
But simply from a perspective of focus, removing all of these somewhat secondary phenomenon from the picture, I believe we are also losing a solid self which is so dependent on a cultivated inner life—one which has always been a struggle for the human person so easily captivated by what is glittering, shallow, and immediately gratifying but which has become shockingly more difficult to fight against in a modern context.
Now, even the most naturally thoughtful and intelligent souls rarely have a moment of boredom into which the more profound insights about reality can be seeded and take root.
This lack of opportunity for depth and consolidation of the self is destroying us.
Losing our interior life
As said previously in another article about a similar topic, without focus we become a strange mix of robotic machine and impulsive animal, without the integrating force of our full and miraculous being as body and soul. We lose sight of the unique and mysterious and unrepeatable composite person that we are, and we start outsourcing our identity to external forces.
This external validation is of course harmful on its own, but I’m speaking here about something even more primitive: that we are training ourselves not only to receive validation that way, but to be so disconnected from our inner life that we barely even realize we are doing this, and barely even have the opportunity for any kind of conscious agency—simply from the lack of focus and ongoing fragmentation of our minds and spirits, and thus lack of interior life, lack of reality, lack of experiential knowledge, lack of self.
The defining characteristic of diagnostic narcissism, as I understand it, is not primarily dramatic abuse benders, or screaming, or shocking manipulation, but something much more primitive and foundational: that the person does not have a steady sense of self, usually due to some extreme toxic form of trauma, neglect, and ultimately lack of meaningful, loving presence in the form of parents to impart that sense of stable identity—especially when paired with excessive material comfort and coddling. This lack of solid self is what makes the other destructive behaviors possible. Sin, vice, defect, whatever we want to call it in a variety of contexts, is, in the end, as spoken of by Augustine, an expression of separation from oneself along with the divine, which inhabits that deepest part of our being.
The person does not learn to self-regulate or find primary purpose and meaning in loving and being loved and instead internalizes a deep rejection and shame from the lack of cultivation of an inner self as a result of this severe detachment from the world of love.
Although that time of infancy and early childhood remains critically important, what I’m seeing is that as our loneliness and dependence on screens continues to mount, and en masse we are losing our sense of a stable inner self, buoyed around by the winds of trends and discourse and sound bytes and lifestyle brands.
We are constantly taking in more information than we can possibly ever properly integrate, and losing touch with the core principles that would help us decide how we want to show up in the world. We are externalizing ourselves into compulsive mimetic desires (always a struggle in every epoch but especially pronounced now), and this is happening in inverse proportion to real-life feedback of attachment and love in our intimate relationships—and sometimes altogether lacking, as fewer people pair off into serious marriages and family formation or become estranged from parents or children, but also even within the family and existing friend and community structures themselves as people live on their phones and in the abstract online world, despite sitting in the same room.
There is less and less separation between work life, phone life, real-life life, and we are shrinking into hollow, fragmented, and confused simulacra of ourselves.
And we are all doing it, in varying degrees. It’s not a question of whether, in most cases, but only to what extent. Seeing this requires a mature sobriety.
To be clear, I am not collapsing severe pathological narcissism into ordinary modern distraction or self-absorption, nor minimizing genuine abuse. What I am describing here is less a clinical diagnosis than a broader cultural drift toward fragmentation, bizarre self-curation, and an almost fully-externalized sense of identity so that we can have the presence of mind to consciously counter it in our own lives and perhaps inspire others to leap out of the pit as well before that behavioral pit hardens into something closer to the pathology and further from the possibility of redemption.
When distraction becomes identity
The contrary quality of narcissism is loving focus on others, God, and the self in an objective way. It is a person with the presence of mind, attention, and agency that makes it possible to choose to will true rather than counterfeit or mere apparent goods to ourselves and others, and this first by having the ability to first recognize that such a choice even exists.
I’m starting to understand that the need for silence, nature, sacred spaces, quiet prayer, reflective evenings, and meaningful leisure is not just about personal health or even an eternal destiny, but truly about simply avoiding becoming the monsters we are all capable of through a compulsive self-focus driven by a loss of self. While focus alone doesn’t create a sense of self, the loss of focus does cause us to lose our baseline capacity to deeply cultivate a real self, and without this real self, we cannot meaningfully engage in the world.
And so as reality recedes ever more into the backdrop of our consciousness by way of our chronic digital existence, picking up the phone, yet again, becomes the most natural solution—confirming even more deeply the neurological routes we have been building ploddingly for over a decade. Thus we perpetuate the evaporating self we barely notice is happening, no matter how inexorable.
Relearning attention, love, and reality
What’s at stake is only absolutely everything.
We will only be able to combat this growing trend toward living in our own little narcissistic silos via acts of real, agentic heroism and encouraging others to do the same. It will look like very practical choices to overcome our sense of the inconvenience of real-life interaction, and cultivating silence and reflection throughout the day in simple but regular organic moments. I recently let my Spotify subscription lapse and have been welcoming the silence in the car, fascinated that I had developed such a compulsion to noise and information in that space. It’s hours a week where, when I am not a bit disgruntled at the many poor Angeleno drivers, I find myself thinking again about life, about plans, about sorrows covered over in time, about old songs of mine I had forgotten I wrote.
Although there are many profound gifts that have come with the digital age (and I am nowhere near recommending the life of a luddite), modern life will take us to a place of loneliness, confusion, narcissism, and despair if we let it.
While keeping one foot in a society now inextricably bound to a digital infrastructure, we must choose to be radically human, tangible, embodied.
We will do this in many ways, but first and foremost through intentionally redeveloping our capacity for attention and focus, thus enabling us to lay the first bricks of a renewed, stronger, sense of self.
KAY CLARITY ARCHIVE 