Are You a Narcissist?

Our Instagram accounts, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, and personal websites refract our lives into a colored light show for all to watch. We come home from building our professional brands, fire up the Netflix stream of reality television, and bop our heads along to “Feeling Myself” by Will.i.am. A study from the National Institutes of Health determined that 9.4 percent of 20- to 29-year-olds exhibit extreme narcissism, compared with 3.2 percent of those older than 65. You might argue that those results say more about youth than about our particular societal moment, but it’s almost a distinction without a difference—youth culture is dominant right now, with a bonanza of hit YA novels, highbrow cartoons, and exalted wunderkinds. But for some experts, narcissism is more than a character flaw, a developmental stage, or an adaptation to social norms.