Against Our Competitive Instincts

I have stopped playing Wordle now because I think it feeds the kind of narcissistic thinking that I want to get rid of. I just read a book about how to deal with emotionally immature people, which include narcissists. In it, the author, a psychologist, said that narcissists tend to like games—board games or trivial games or any kind of games—and enjoy winning. By the way, normal people like to play games too. So a person who likes to play poker, for example, may not be a narcissist.

And I have to say my parents, who were very narcissistic, didn’t like any kind of games at all. However, several other narcissists I know really like to play word games, board games, poker games, and mahjong (I mean the competitive mahjong game, not the simple computer game that comes with Windows installation).

There are some other narcissistic traits I want to get rid of. For example, as a non-native speaker, I can very rarely do a crossword game, understand a double entendre, or appreciate a self-deprecating statement. It is not in my genes, I guess. However for a very long time, I tried very hard to do the impossible, only succeeding in frustrating myself or embarrassing myself. Now I think of it and realize that I should just give up. Why don’t I explore some other aspects of the English language which are suitable for a non-native speaker or some special niche that non-native speakers are good at? I have wasted my time on doing what is impossible for me to do.

I recall something else I did that reflected my narcissistic tendencies. I could always ace the math exams when I was in school. It didn’t mean that I was good at math or that I was interested in math. Not at all. However my near perfect scores in math gave me an illusion that I was a budding mathematician. To feed my vanity, I participated in the school’s math team, went to math training, and enjoyed myself when solving math problems. Actually I only enjoyed the sense of getting some accomplishments. I have no real interest in math. How much time I wasted back then in math. Much ado about nothing!

As you know, I was a saleswoman for several years, working in a sales office to sell some products to the Asian community here. I didn’t really understand the products and didn’t really have an incentive to have an in-depth understanding of what I was selling. Anyway, the sales training we received really fed some narcissistic notions to us. For example, it created a fierce competition between colleagues, between teams, between a salesperson with his or her past record. It deliberately created a hierarchy, like deliberately paying the junior members less while giving the top sales bonus that was equivalent to their salary. It taught us sales strategy, in which one can utilize psychology to make more sales, to talk with people only for a specific agenda and nothing else.

Well, I want to recall every detail and cleanse it out of my system.