If you’ve ever lived with or worked with a narcissist, you know that the way they operate can be stressful at best and disastrous at worst. A recent article in Psychology Today summed it up well: Narcissists have no respect for experts and boundaries, live for drama, and will throw others under the bus at any moment to further their agenda.

My last experience interacting with a narcissist was in a professional relationship from which I am still recovering. I work in consulting, and at one time my main client was a startup media agency owned and operated by narcissists. The company was dysfunctional and toxic:

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Owners cannot deal with any negative person around them.

They shift any blame or responsibility placed on them onto other people.

They spent all the company’s savings on an agent to try to get themselves a TV show so they could become widely famous.

If you’ve ever had to work or live with a narcissist for a long period, you know the type of behavior I’m talking about. Week after week, we were left to clean up the smoldering wreckage of the empty promises these owners made to their customers, and at least one employee was placed on forced medical leave due to exhaustion. It was exhausting and exhausting.

Around this time, I watched an episode of The Tim Ferriss Show that featured Dr. Brené Brown. As a world-renowned researcher on resilience and shame, Dr. Brown’s insights first came to the main stage with her 2010 TEDx Talk on Vulnerability, one of the most popular talks of all time.

The two best-selling authors went back and forth on different topics in a refreshingly unscripted conversation, and in this dialogue, some startling gems came to the surface. One of them was a note from Dr. Brown about narcissists and how most people misinterpret the way they operate. I was managed by narcissists at the time, and I naturally leaned.

Officially defining narcissism

According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V), a person is said to have narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) when they exhibit five or more of the following nine criteria:

1. Has a great sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates accomplishments and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate accomplishments).
2. Preoccupied with delusions of unlimited success, power, intelligence, beauty, or perfect love.
3. Believes that they are “special” and unique and can only be understood or communicated by other people (or institutions) or people of high status.
4. Requires excessive admiration.
5. Has a sense of entitlement (i.e. unreasonable expectations of special preferential treatment or automatic compliance with their expectations).
6. Exploits others (i.e. exploits others to achieve their own goals).
7. Lacks empathy: Does not want to recognize or learn about the feelings and needs of others.
8. He often envies others or believes that others are jealous of him.

9. Displays arrogant and arrogant behaviors or attitudes.

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The first thing that came to my mind after reading these criteria is that these characteristics seem to apply to a lot of people. (About half of Instagram, yes?) My second thought is darker: Am I a narcissist? Then comes my third thought: Is everyone a narcissist?

Social media certainly is a catalyst for this behavior, right? not necessarily. Researchers have been studying the relationships between narcissism and the environment for a while, and although it’s easy to assume that the more social media-savvy generations are more narcissistic, science doesn’t back that up.

What science says about mainstream narcissism

Research published in the journal Psychological Science in 2016 found that today’s youth are no more narcissistic in the clinical sense than previous generations. They have just learned to look at themselves from an early age.

They also have more agency to do this through tools like smartphones, selfies, and social media feeds. (I thank my lucky stars that I was born in 1987 and missed the Instagram scene in seventh grade, honestly.)

There’s also a curious 2018 paper published by the Public Library of Science that asserts that cultural norms are factors in shaping personality.

In this study, scientists examined differences between the populations of former West Germany and former East Germany; Germans who grew up in the culturally more individualistic West Germany reported higher levels of desire for greatness and lower levels of self-esteem than citizens of the more collectivistic East Germany.

I won’t let us all off the hook that easily. A 2018 report from Allianz Global Assistance found that a third of millennials intentionally style their vacation photos to make trips look better than they were, with three in five saying the primary goal of the effort is to inspire envy.

Although we may not all develop into diagnosable narcissists, the nuances of modern life likely enable many of us to exhibit some narcissistic personality traits. So when does it go off the rails and into complete chaos? For this, I will return to Dr. Brown.