T-shirt #180: Sand Castle Competition 1990

T-shirt #180: Sand Castle Competition 1990

So, I was walking home from teaching my classes at WMU yesterday, half-paying attention to my audio book, and thinking about my blog, when a thought struck me so hard and fast that I felt it was warranted to take out my phone and email myself a reminder while I was walking. This may not have been the safest thing to do. But I kept my eyes peeled for hazards, and nothing came of it, though I did actually walk under a ladder that a Charter service person had left propped to a utility pole, unoccupied.

This description is all just to set the scene. Flavor. Savory.

What was I thinking about? Narcissism.

I created a whole category for narcissism, but so far, I have only addressed this subject in any depth once in T-shirt #77, which may have the distinction of being the single most often referenced blog post on my blog. Referenced by me, that is. I am not going to count, but it seems to me that I have referenced this one more than any others. And this makes sense, as T-shirt #77 was a pivotal blog post. I turned a corner at that blog post. I also used it to bury my confession that I had cancer and was going to have my prostate out, which some people actually read. Thank you!

The subject of T-shirt #77 is integral to the blog. Originally, I dismissed the idea of doing the blog as overly narcissistic and self-indulgent. Who would care about the meaning behind my t-shirts? Even more strange, would anyone care to read so much about comic books, 1960s and 1970s nostalgia, the episodic narrative, my top 100 albums, and other subjects I care to explore (and exploit).

A great deal of my thinking and development for the blog culminated in T-shirt #77. I realized that I needed to provide more content to readers than just some thoughts on why I like my t-shirt for that day. I wanted to make my blog a conversation starter, a place to learn things, or to be reminded of things worth thinking about that you already know. I wanted to try to escape the inherent narcissism of the occupation and provide relevant, thought-provoking, and frequently entertaining content for regular readers, occasional readers, and those who just Stumble Upon the blog.

In T-shirt #77, I questioned how quick we are in our culture to brand someone as ADD or ADHD and now how quick we are to cast stones for NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder). These ideas are similar to my criticism back in the late 1980s of the self help book The Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them. Though misogyny is very real and though abuse (both physical and emotional) is also very real, I felt that The Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them could be applied unscrupulously and too easily. In an effort to help women realize that they may be in an abusive relationship with a misogynist, the author defined many different types of women haters, especially those who are very good at hiding their hatred of women, so much so that many of these men may not even be aware that they are misogynists. I thought the book was a bit reckless as the author defined so many types and described behavior in such a way that the book may be able to convince every woman that she may be involved with a misogynist. Nowhere in the book did the author engage in a disclaimer that some men are not misogynists nor did she ever caution readers to be careful in leaping to conclusions based on her descriptions. I remember giving my essay on the subject to a woman I wanted to date at the time, and she ripped me a new asshole, wrongly accusing me of trying to skirt a real and dangerous issue and unfairly criticize a book that could help women escape abusive relationships. I did not understand her ire, and I felt that she misunderstood my main argument. Needless to say, we did not have a romantic relationship. But just as our culture breeds attention deficit behaviors and narcissistic behaviors in people, it also breeds behaviors that may be abusive or seem misogynistic; however, just as not everyone suffers from Attention-Deficit Disorder or Narcissistic Personality Disorder not all men are misogynists. We need to be careful about how we apply labels.

So, these are the thoughts I had on my walk home about narcissism and where ruminating on narcissism took my brain. I think my blog is narcissistic. But I do not feel that I have Narcissistic Personality Disorder. It's true that what I am doing is inherently arrogant, just as producing any art is arrogant in its assumption that other people--that anyone--will care about what I think, what I feel, and what I care about. I accept these assumptions. Okay, there's inherent arrogance and narcissism here. Neither is a good reason to abandon the project nor never attempt it in the first place.

I am grateful for your readership whether you are regular, occasional, or stumbled in. If inspired, share these thoughts in a conversation with someone. Let me know how it goes.

Today's shirt was given to me by my father. His company (TPTA = Tower, Pinkster, Titus Architects and Engineers) competed in an annual sand castle designing and building competition. They felt it was a fun thing for architects to do, being architects and all. I believe my father and my sister always participated, but I do not recall that I ever did. Still, the whole family received shirts. I have written about my family before, and I will again, so I will leave off on that subject for now to instead close with something geeky and about science which I want to share, which is that inherent narcissism and arrogance again, but I think it's worth it.

Stumbled Upon this great comic strip via Stumble Upon .

This comic comes from THE OATMEAL: it's about TESLA. That's the Stumble Upon link.

Enjoy.

- chris tower - 1309.17 - 8:56

T-shirt #77: Narcissism

T-shirt #77: Narcissism

Yesterday, my wife was reading a Time Magazine article, and she asked me if I thought that the "Millenial Generation" was more narcissistic, entitled, privileged, self-absorbed than our generation. I said no, despite the data presented in the Time Magazine article, which has its portal here (though the full article is only accessible to subscribers): "The Me Me Me Generation."

Of what Time Magazine allows us to see, one can read the following: "The incidence of narcissistic personality disorder is nearly three times as high for people in their 20s as for the generation that's now 65 or older, according to the National Institutes of Health; 58% more college students scored higher on a narcissism scale in..." (Stein, 2013).

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2143001,00.html#ixzz2VLHHSkzk

I left in the the "Read more" link because when I copied just the text from Time Magazine, the site automatically appended the text with the Read more blurb and URL. Tricksy Tricksy.

Though I am not disputing that Narcissistic Personality Disorder is a very real and very destructive force of psyche, I would like to question the data and how the National Institute of Health arrived at those statistics.

The modern world breeds conditions like Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) and Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). It's no wonder that both entered into serious study around the 1970s. Again, ADD is a very real thing, but it's also very prevalent with almost everyone in our modern world to some degree, especially among people who use various forms of technology to interact with and consume media and who engage actively in social media outlets. Because of the very nature of media, social media, and all the access technologies, everyone involved is a little (and some quite a bit more than a little) narcissistic and ADD (used in the common vernacular as an adjective for someone displaying the symptoms of ADD). But there's a significant difference between showing signs and symptoms and having a disorder. Are we a little quick to slap a "disorder" label on basic human reactions to our complex, modern world?

When I read the definition of  NPD, I find that it does not universally apply to those in my life whom I may label as narcissists or when I find that I am labeling myself as narcissistic. "Narcissistic Personality Disorder involves arrogant behavior, a lack of empathy for other people, and a need for admiration-all of which must be consistently evident at work and in relationships. People who are narcissistic are frequently described as cocky, self-centered, manipulative, and demanding. Narcissists may concentrate on unlikely personal outcomes (e.g., fame) and may be convinced that they deserve special treatment ("Psychology Today," 2013). This list features seriously damaging personality traits, such as lack of empathy and manipulations.

So back to the discussion with my wife, are the children of today any more entitled, manipulative, or privileged than we were? No. I don't think so. Granted, those of us who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s (and to some extent those from the 1980s) can grouse and complain about how much MORE the children of today have: more television channels, more product choices, more technology, just MORE. I am sure I am not the only person from my age group who has said that my smartphone has ten times the computer power and capacity of my first three computers combined. I am sure I am not the only one who has discussed with his peers how different our lives would have been if had we been plugged in the way the kids of today are plugged in with all the choices and fun games and access to media that we have today. (In fact, both these themes have appeared already in this blog and will recur as often re-visited themes.)

It's a new and different world today than the one of my childhood, and with the next singularity (or singularities) approaching as described by Ray Kurzweil (see trailer and link elsewhere on this page), the changes we have seen so far are just the beginning of changes so transformative that our culture of the near future may well be indistinguishable from the world of the 1970s in just a few years.

Not on Netflix. Not via Amazon. Buy it? Here.

And yet, are we fostering and enabling a generation of NPDs?