A Guide to Recognize Narcissists on Social Media
Tags: Self Improvement, Life, Social Media, Narcissism, Psychology

A Guide to Recognize Narcissists on Social Media

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Do you encounter narcissistic people only in books and movies or do you have a lot around you? Let’s focus on how narcissists use social media. It’s going to be a bit of a long post, so prepare yourself now.

The Ordinary People’s sense of worthlessness

The basic desire of the people of our age is to be known. A deep sense of worthlessness underlies the desire for recognition. People who try to cope with the feeling of worthlessness have to satisfy their need for recognition, acceptance, admiration and appreciation. At this point, taking advantage of the internet and mostly social media platforms to create magnificent, interesting and appreciative virtual personas (identity) makes the narcissist’s job much easier.

Narcissism

Before we start, let’s remember what narcissism is. Throughout the article, many things may be familiar to you, as you read, review yourself and your environment, but do not try to make a diagnosis.

The origin of the word comes from Narkissos, a hero in Greek mythology who is in love with his image reflected in the lake. Narcissus gave its name to narcosis and narcissus, a family of flowers.

Generally, narcissism is defined as “admiration and devotion to one’s own physical and spiritual self”.

Sigmund Freud explained narcissism as “directing the libido (sexual energy) abstracted from the outside world to the ego (me)”. That is, the libido is collected in the ego like being collected in a large warehouse and then directed to objects, but it is a situation where it is easily re-abstracted and directed towards the ego.

Types of narcissism

There are two types of narcissism as exhibitionist narcissism and latent narcissism.

Exhibitionist Narcissism (overtype): It is very important for this type of narcissists to perceive the self as magnificent, important and unique. They are obsessed with dreams of unlimited success, power, magnificence, beauty. They experience the difficulty that exhibitionism requires constant attention and admiration. They feel inferiority, shame, and humiliation.

Covert Narcissism (cover type): Not all narcissists are showy and aggressive. Characteristics of the covert narcissist include a silent stealth/superiority, self-care, lack of empathy, and quickness to judge people or tasks as “boring” or “stupid.”

Both sound familiar, right? There are lots of such narcissists around us. Perhaps you too are showing signs of narcissism in some ways.

Artists were able to solve this situation very well with their works. But the situation of the ordinary person is much more difficult. He did not produce a single piece of work in his life, did not make a single sentence consisting of the words he liked in each of the letters, built his life on a deep feeling of worthlessness, his perfect ego, which was satisfied in the crowds, was destroyed in the loneliness of the house, in the harsh wind of loneliness, all his worthlessness was mixed together, made of flesh and bones. How do ordinary people, frozen like a tree dying in the ordinariness of their existence, trying to reach the others (other people) they need?

Social media and narcissism

At this point, the benefits of the internet come into play. Today’s people, who cannot spend even a minute without the internet, turn social media into a tool to satisfy their ego. He tries to suppress the feeling of worthlessness that ruins his life, thanks to the amazing personas he creates on social media. So much so that now he becomes able to make his virtual persona more impressive, admired, appreciated and approved, and repair the fragmentation of his ego with the majority of his followers.

But repairing the ego in this way comes at a high price. He must stay online for hours each day, liking some of his followers’ posts, commenting, and responding to incoming messages in order to appear to care. He should keep his virtual persona alive and post frequently. He knows very well that if he does not share a lot, his likes will decrease and his ego will be damaged. Therefore, they should take action and visit cafes, restaurants, bars, towers, palaces, mosques, churches, historical monuments, parks, forests, mountains and far-away countries to share their followers and share them on social media, which is the satisfaction headquarters of his ego.

As the race heats up, the narcissist invests more in their posts to stay behind and not be shaken. Takes photos with clothes that will show better, buys more expensive phones for better photos. Today, the most important thing people pay attention to when searching for phone models is the resolution level of the camera, that is, the quality of the person to show the person better.

When everyone accesses good quality phones, the photos are made “more beautiful than they are” by adding effects to the photos. Things get a little harder when everyone starts to look ‘prettier than they are’ and no one really looks ‘as beautiful as they are’, and the narcissistic person now has to go to interesting activities to take into account their virtual persona.

The narcissist tries to breathe a little by squeezing himself into the view of the most famous towers, buildings and monuments, in front of the object that will most satisfy his ego among thousands of objects in art galleries, concerts, movie theaters, museums, and present it to the taste of the followers.

Because he cannot deal with the worthlessness of his life alone, he clings to his followers. If the splendor of his virtual personas seems to decrease, he will be in great panic.

In pursuit of all this, he does not try to discover his true value. Even if he admires himself, he doesn’t really love himself and even hates himself. The narcissist needs other people’s likes, not his own. But he doesn’t really like other people either. They are important as long as he satisfies them. It does not bond with them, does not try to understand, and gets close enough to meet the need to be valuable.

Exhibitionist narcissists are very comfortable with this and can be easily noticed. These types of narcissists make their posts openly waiting to be liked. They don’t hide their needs and try everything to be satisfied. Exhibitionist narcissists are very active people.

Latent narcissists, on the other hand, are more profound, quiet, and difficult to recognize. They use social media, but they don’t share much. While exhibitionistic narcissists love to be watched, latent narcissists love to watch. They like the idea of ‘watching others’ lives and admiring the beauty of their own life. Although there is a very little post on your profile, they are actually always online and busy humiliating a lot of people at the time.

Thanks to social media, ordinary people had a chance to be more ‘visible’.

Just as the “visible” life (images of artists) was presented in the mainstream media 15–20 years ago, now social media lives in the illusion of that fiction. The audience that grew up by watching all the broadcasts of the mainstream media in their childhood has a lot of information in the minds of the celebrities (that is, the visible ones) and today, with the construction of personal media, people should dress just like those artists in order to be ‘visible’ with the effect of that childhood trauma, began to travel, repeat the postures of the models, and embellish the characters of the actors. Everyone lives in the dream of being a phenomenon of their own social media.

Social media is like a movie screen for ordinary people, narcissists fall in love with the image they project on the screen and imagine that everyone sees themselves as magnificent as they see them.

Unfortunately, the number of narcissists has grown like an avalanche as everyone repeats and multiplies each other in a huge predicament.

Collective narcissism

Although it is not mentioned as a type of narcissism, I would like to mention the concept of collective narcissism in terms of expressing society.

Collective Narcissism: It was first proposed by the sociologist Theodor Adorno in the 1930s. Since sociologists at that time focused on wartime social processes, this concept was considered to be seeing one’s own nation as superior to others.

I can say that there are some changes that are enough to reinterpret this definition today. The people of these times, who have completely moved away from society, experience the peaks of individuality.

The meeting areas of the new age are the hashes of platforms such as Twitter and Instagram.

Social media has turned into the windpipe of narcissists who need the likes of other people in this century when the individual is drawn into the shell. In this way, he will be able to be visible from his seat and will stick to these platforms as long as he masses his likes.

As the people of our age become lonely, they have turned towards establishing virtual ties with others thanks to social media. Now it is unclear whether one can speak of crowd loneliness or a crowd of loneliness. With the increasing trend of narcissistic tendencies, it has become more important to talk about virtual massiveness as before.

Social media has started to meet the needs of narcissists by turning into people who are known and admired, making people who are far from creative, visible just like those celebrities in their collective memory. Today, every street, every city square, and the image of every historical artifact has turned into a repeating photo dump for lonely and unhappy people who take photos with them. The most beautiful nature landscapes have turned into selfies cemeteries repeating each other.

The people who ‘put his nose’ in everything have somehow become people who ‘put his heads’ in everything.

There are almost no hidden corners left in the world that have no selfies.

Social media has become a new and irresistible object of collective narcissism.

As a result, the problem of dealing with narcissism’s feelings of worthlessness has become the main concern of social media platforms today. They are making a serious effort to have you follow and like them. I think the number of people with the characteristics I mentioned throughout the article is increasing day by day. It may be easier to protect yourself if you get to know narcissistic people well and quickly notice their fake relationships with you.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the article, focus on understanding yourself and those around you instead of diagnosing yourself.