ANDY YE

You ever hear your parent or anyone talk to you about work, or something in life, or past relationship mistakes, and then at the very end say “I hope that this can help you see like the experiences of my life and hopefully that can help you”? Even though you did not ask about what they said, nor does it apply to your life at all? Or at the end of this conversation, rather than “help you a bit,” they transition to giving you life advice?

Venting is not inherently bad, but you need to acknowledge that you are venting. But of course, you’ll feel bad about it, and we all change the frame of it because we feel shame about making a conversation so one sided. It’s advice by the way! This can be bad, especially if it is coming from a parent. If a parent has had a poor relationship, and speaks about it framed as advice to a kid, then the kid’s only real model of relationships – their parents and this advice – will be used to judge future relationships.

To me, narcissism is defined as caring about the image of a thing rather than the thing itself. In this scenario, this parent feels shame for venting to their child, so they want to skew the image so that they are not venting and in fact helping the child. Guys this is an act of benevolence! I am preparing my child for the future. I am being a good parent. They know that they were just venting – but the idea that they can fallback on a claim with a single explainable node that points to it being advice is enough to them to feel better. If poked, they will feel shame again. But everyone does this, it’s just important to be clear about it. If you vented, just say, thanks for listening to me venting. If you’re actually giving advice, you’re doing it when they ask.

Me telling you this is for your own good bro… I hope you can use this in the future… I think this can show you about how corporate life is like…. I hope this gives you a look into how human relationships are… Later in your life when you know more you’ll see this… Maybe this can prove useful in your own life… Anyway so this is what you can expect going into college… I hope this GHAHGHHGAHG

Of course this maps outwards. If I did 30 minutes of studying and played video games for 3 hours, I’d feel like shit. If I was asked what I did for the past 4 hours, I’d say I studied and then played video games. Then I’d feel better about myself, because I technically wasn’t lying, and now the guy who asked me also knows that I was not just playing video games, and that I was studying. Because if he thinks that I wasn’t just wasting time, then that’s enough, because I was doing the studying to tell him that I was studying anyway.

But it is not more okay, it doesn’t change what I did. You can go another layer with this, if the guy asks “how long did you study for?” I could say “a good amount of time.” Narcissism thrives in the undefined, you assume the best about what you want. All this to say that framing what you’re doing into nebulosity based on a small malleable bit of what you were doing when it is clearly self serving is not the way to go. Just something to be conscious of.

This is the same with the honeymoon stage of an relationship. When you are first meeting someone, you don’t know anything about them. You only know how they are superficially. This is essentially a dumbed down version of an TLP article, but because there is ambiguity, we can daydream so, so much. They are everything that we want, because we know nothing about them. We can fantasize endlessly, maybe they’ll like the same music as me! Maybe they’ll also play some instrument, maybe they have a beautiful singing voice, blah blah. But you don’t actually know, so you tell yourself that they have these traits since it’s more fun to daydream positively.

So you daydream about them, and as you do, you keep going on dates, learning more about them. People think the “fire” goes out, but the fire isn’t their relationship, it’s that you can’t doctor in the perfect words on the mad libs that is their life. The moment they tell you their music taste, they stop having any other music tastes. The moment they start singing, that is their singing voice. When you understand them more, that’s when they become defined, and you can’t daydream them into being whatever you want anymore.

This is why women love mystery – they want to know what’s inside! But before they do, they’ll fill in blanks themselves forever. God forbid she actually solves you, that’d be pretty bad… since you’d be defined. Remember Minecraft guy dream’s face reveal? Everyone clowned on the guy, he’s not even that bad looking. But the fanbase clowned on him *because* he was faceless, and being faceless allowed people to fantasize that he is some 7’1 hunk of a man, or that he was beautiful, I don’t know, something, anything. But when he showed his face, he stopped being everything else.

This is always self serving, you always think what you want to think. I hear the guy going “but dude, like, what if I always daydream that my relationship will go sour? Everything is gonna go wrong bro how is this self serving?” Well you want to think that it will go sour, because then you’ve already convinced yourself that it is going to go wrong, and you’d rather the relationship go poorly than for you to be wrong. You care more about saying “I knew it!”

This is the same as if I was forced to tell the guy who asked me about what I really did during those 4 hours. 10 minutes of studying and 3 hours of video games sounds real bad, huh. I don’t even have to say video games I could just say “I worked and I relaxed.” I do this all the time. Fuck.