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There are few terms the internet loves using more than “narcissist.” It’s become the label that’s slung at every enemy you can imagine. Completely disregarding the lived-in reality of narcissism and narcissistic abuse, the word itself has become synonymous with every selfish or toxic person.

Despite our willingness to point the finger of narcissism at others, all of those traits exist within each of us. It’s an unpleasant truth, but a truth all the same. We all have narcissistic tendencies to an extent, and it is often these tendencies that trap us in the worst possible positions.

That’s certainly what’s happened with social media, which has picked at the worst aspects of our humanity to create a cesspool of negativity. Have you fallen into this trap? It’s an easier slide into chaos than you may imagine.

Social media caters to our lowest instincts.

There is little doubt that social media is one of the most powerful tools the human species has ever wielded. With the click of a button, you can be transported to the other side of the world and exposed to issues that you never conceived of. It has impacted everything from cultural trends to the very political bodies that run our countries.

We are still in the infancy of our social media use. While we have seen it tumble leaders and change world views, we have yet to see the full extent of its good and bad effects.

Some of those effects are becoming apparent now. Patterns are emerging, and we are seeing changes in the way we, as humans, operate and relate to one another through the digital channels of social media.

Social media, while world-altering when used for good, can be easily twisted to cater to our lowest instincts. More specifically, social media presents a special temptation for the narcissistic tendencies we all have buried within us.

These narcissistic appeals come with a sea of consequences all their own. When used in the wrong way and with the wrong intentions, platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok can alter how we see ourselves, those around us, and our role. There is no corner of the human psyche that is not touched.

How social media may be targeting your narcissistic tendencies.

Are your narcissistic tendencies being triggered by your social media use? Digging deep, we can see answers we may not want to see. Unaligned social media use is toxic, no matter what platform you haunt. Failing to set the right intentions and boundaries, you can become more self-centered, delusional, and trapped in the life you’re creating for yourself.

Centering the self

There are few ways to use social media platforms without centering yourself in the midst of it all. Facebook encourages you to share every mundane aspect of your life — right down to every flippant political whimsy you may have. Instagram pushes you to share photos and videos in a way that is almost compulsive.

It becomes all about me, me, me when you’re online. Are you getting likes for the funny things you say? What are the cool things you do with all your really cool friends? If not, are you not cool enough? Is your life not interesting enough?

Social media pushes you to center on yourself unhealthily, but it gets far worse than that. More than pushing you to center yourself on superficial topics, it can push you to center yourself on important issues and dialogues in which you should have little to no part.

Take, for example, the “ally” who decides to pick up the torch of activism after becoming engaged in emotionally sensitive topics on a Facebook page. This social justice warrior risks becoming more of a danger than a help as they center themselves and their feelings at the heart of important community issues.

Social media will even push you to become emotionally centered in conversations that don’t concern you at all. You may have no power in the fight whatsoever, but you become the center of the chaos.

It distracts from the actual issues and the actual communities that need help. It reinforces the idea that the ally carrying the torch is more important than the people for whom the torch was picked up…and that helps no one make this world a better place. If anything, it keeps everything very much the same.

Main character energy

There is big main character energy that is encouraged by heavy social media use. The more engaged someone becomes in that self-centered activity, the more they come to see themselves as more important than those around them (especially those receiving less validation from social media). It is not a good mindset to adopt.

Believing yourself to be the “main character” creates a certain amount of delusion. You see yourself as an actor in a film. You’re disengaged from reality. Everything about you becomes more important and amplified.

The worst part of this “main character energy” mindset isn’t just the arrogance and self-centeredness that it reinforces. It’s the dangerous hierarchical thinking that it creates in your subconscious.

Break it down and really think about it for a second.

If you are the center of the story, then everyone around you is B-list. If their stories aren’t as important as yours, then their experiences are inherently smaller and less valuable than your own. See the danger there?

Our narcissistic tendencies love a hierarchy. They love to feel superior to others with no rhyme, reason, or justification. It’s a comfortable place to be. However, it’s important we learn to avoid the temptation of superiority.

Deregulating emotion

There seems to be a distinct lack of emotional regulation across every social media platform. You can’t help but notice. Angry people, screaming at each other across the digital emptiness. They vomit their hatred, their frustration, their disappointment, and their grief on anyone who is low enough for them to swing at. No one seems to have control anymore.

This is a pretty slippery slope when you’re already living in a traumatized society with people who continue to get brutalized day in and day out.

How can you successfully learn how to regulate your emotions and your thoughts when you are constantly being bombarded by those who refuse to do that same work? It’s an impossible task.

And that’s precisely what narcissistic people struggle with, too. Seeing the world to be responsible for all the ills they experience, they insist on everyone around them handling their emotions for them.

Narcissistic people can’t self-soothe. They expect others to regulate their emotions for them. So, if there’s no one immediately around, the narcissist is not above hopping online to abuse those they see as beneath them in some way.

Social media provides them with the perfect tool to offload the emotions they don’t have the courage to face.

Forcing all-importance

Unfortunately, social media has created the idea that we — and our lives as a whole — are all-important. It’s a pattern of social media use. For these platforms to sell space to advertisers, they need you to spend as much time as possible on the platforms. The only way to do that is to get you to emotionally invest in the things you are sharing and interacting with.

Appealing to your narcissistic side does just that.

Platforms create algorithms that lift you up like a god. You are encouraged to share every silly little detail of your life, but worse than that, you are encouraged to think that everything you do is important. That everything you have to think or say is unique.

That’s not the truth, but would you use something like Facebook if they told you the truth?

Would you spend hours a day scrolling through pictures, posting your own pictures, and sharing every random thought you had if Twitter told you that 5K other people had just posted the same thought? That you’re just like every other person on the planet?

No. The narcissistic side of you — the part that craves greatness but suspects they are weak — wants to be at the top of the pile. It wants to think that it is the only person who has ever looked a certain way or thought a certain way. Our narcissistic tendencies crave the isolation of greatness.

It’s all a trap, though…

There is nothing entirely unique to any single one of us. Are we different? Sure. Do we have different things to offer this world and ourselves? Sure. But we aren’t unique. There are a million other people just like us, and there will be a million other people who come after us.

Accepting that reality is freeing and allows you to remove the pressure of perfection from your already over-stressed shoulders.

Creating projections

Name any social media platform, and you will find people performing behind masks. For some, that mask is a big smiling social life. They snap their trips, travels, shopping, and celebrations. For others, it’s the mask of a perfect family, a perfect career, or the perfect all-around self.

Almost everyone is masking who they really are online. That’s because social media encourages us to show the world a “perfect” face. We get likes and comments (aka validation) from showing our friends what they want to see, and what they expect to see.

We don’t show them when things are falling apart. We don’t tell them that our hearts are broken, that we’re struggling to get up in the morning. We don’t talk about feeling all wrong since the world shut down 3 years ago.

No. That’s not how we use social media. We tell people about our wins. We tell them what’s going right in our lives and why they should look at us with envy and longing. It’s all a performance.

Social media targets your narcissistic tendencies by forcing you into a place where you have to mask to get validation or to keep up with the Joneses. And that’s what narcissistic people do, too. They create masks to hide their insecurities. They wear masks to hide the darkness around those they desire to trick and trap.

Minimizing empathy

Hands down, the most dangerous way that social media targets our narcissistic side is by minimizing our empathy. It happens subtly, and it happens over time. Little by little, heavy social media users experience overexposure to anger, arrogance, and cruelty. They see some of the most heinous human behaviors so much that they become numb to them.

Alongside this worrying normalization of violence and hostility, we see entire groups of people dehumanized daily on social media. Again, being exposed to these ideas repeatedly can become an accepted outlook.

Over time, this has the potential to minimize the empathy you have for others and their experiences. It also works to encourage jealousy and competition vs. community and compassion (the very thing we need in this world).

How does that play at our narcissistic tendencies? One of the hallmark traits of true narcissistic behavior is a lack of emotional empathy. Narcissists can turn themselves against others they have judged unworthy and dehumanize and destroy them.

It gives them that sense of superiority they crave. The same applies to social media.

Feeding into your own narcissistic tendencies, you can see yourself getting swept up in a wave of supremacy before you know what’s happening. Believing yourself better than others, you end up drowning in a world of hyper-individualism, loneliness, and frustration.

Is there time to turn it all around?

It can seem pretty hopeless when you look around. Social media use and feelings of isolation and hopelessness are increasing. What happens to a society in which the majority feels isolated? Hopeless? It’s not a trick question. We have seen the results time and time again.

We can break the narcissistic ties we’ve formed with social media by:

• Changing the way we use it
• Shifting the intentions we have
• Holding platforms accountable

Foremost, we have to change the way we use social media. Unfettered use is no good for our narcissistic natures. We need to limit the time we spend on every platform and change the type of content that we interact with. There are bigger-picture considerations to make, too.

As a society, we’re going to have to ask ourselves some serious questions about the future of social media and how it is accessed by our children. Already, there are some serious consequences for teens and adolescents who spend too much time on social media. None of that can be ignored as we consider limiting our exposure to these platforms.

Our intentions have to be shifted, too.

The narcissistic elements within us crave the validation of strangers on the internet, but that applause is empty. Our opinions and experiences of self are the only ones we should focus on. Validating ourselves by finding our purpose and our tribe should be the only concern.

All of this will be easier to hold true to when we hold these social media platforms accountable. Make no mistake; they know what behaviors they are triggering in you. These platforms hire psychologists to help them design addictive and negative platforms that keep you engaged, insecure, and spending money with their advertisers.

These facts need to become common knowledge, and leaders like Mark Zuckerberg should be held accountable for their greed and ignorance.

***

The world has been forever changed by social media. Humanity, as a whole, has been forever shaped by it. There’s no more time to ignore the obvious. Not these changes are for the better. Rather than falling into a swamp of narcissism, we have to reach now for the light of truth.

Release your attachments to your social media platform of choice and reach for something else instead. There is a better way to connect, but you’re going to have to disconnect from your narcissistic self to find it.

Akkoz, Mihriban & Erbas, Oytun. (2020). The relationship between social media use and narcissism. Demiroglu Science University Florence Nightingale Transplantation Journal. 5. 32-38. 10.5606/dsufnjt.2020.014.