When did all of our enemies become narcissists?
This one's boss is a narcissist. That one's ex is a narcissist. Everyone's parents are narcissists.
Of all the garbage social media has polluted our culture with—political polarization, purple toothpaste, those stupid Stanley water bottles—this has to be one of the strangest.
At some point, it became fashionable to slap the label narcissist on anyone behaving badly. Why?
Sure, Narcissistic Personality Disorder does exist. There may even be a very conspicuous example of it in public life, although I'm not qualified to diagnose anyone. Still, it's a minority affliction. The Cleveland Clinic reports that it affects around 0.5% to 5% of Americans. Clearly, most people who behave badly from time to time do not qualify for a diagnosis. Some people may instead be unkind due to their depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, addiction, paranoia, delusion, or simple unhappiness. Others are just jerks.
The word narcissist doesn't even make sense in the conventional sense, stripped of its clinical associations. Maybe your boss obsesses over metrics and thinks they know better than the experts. That's not narcissism. That's not mental illness. That's just corporate life. (I would encourage anyone with a boss like that to fire them by walking out, but I would never be tempted to call that person a narcissist.)
Language evolves, and I suppose people can use the term narcissist to mean brute or louse, if they choose. The dictionary wasn't handed down from the heavens, unchangeable. I just think the term narcissist implies a degree of intent that usually doesn't exist. Maybe that person at the convention shouted at you because they struggle with anger or because they never learned how disagree respectfully, not because they want to feel superior to you.
"They're all narcissists," one might say. "They all treated me badly!"
Personally, I'm fine sticking with words like crazy and nuts. Yes, the former is loosely related to mania (as in “crazed energy”), but hardly anyone makes that association any more. As for nuts, no one is going to think a speaker is comparing a malicious oddball to a shelled fruit. I would also approve of any better word that could be found. Hardly any word could be as nonsensical as narcissist.
I have to wonder whether people are so cavalier with the term narcissist because they want to deflect attention from their own narcissism. Here, I'm not talking about clinical narcissism, the type that seriously harms oneself and others. I'm not even talking about a more ordinary kind of narcissism which drives bad behavior. Rather, I'm talking about the kind of narcissism that leads one to believe that anyone actually cares about their status updates. Social media certainly fosters some amount of casual, everyday narcissism. Could it be that people throw the term around because they're uncomfortable facing their own unjustified self-absorption?
Instead of throwing labels around, maybe we should spend more time looking in the mirror—in a healthy way. I will endeavor to do the same.
edit: I completely rewrote this post on 2026-09-04 because I was unhappy with the original prose, which I found awkward. Maybe writing about language itself is harder than it seems.