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Routine
I hate routine. When I find myself doing the same things over and over again, I get depressed. I oversleep, overeat, overdrink and, in general, engage in addictive, impulsive and compulsive behaviors. This is my way of re-introducing risk and excitement into what I (emotionally) perceive to be a barren life.
The problem is that even the most exciting and varied existence becomes routine after a while. Living in the same country or apartment, meeting the same people, doing essentially the same things (though with changing content)- all "qualify" as stultifying rote.
I feel entitled to more. I feel it is my right - due to my intellectual superiority - to lead a thrilling, rewarding, kaleidoscopic life. I feel entitled to force life itself, or, at least, people around me - to yield to my wishes and needs, supreme among them the need for stimulating variety.
This rejection of habit is part of a larger pattern of aggressive entitlement. I feel that the very existence of a sublime intellect (such as myself) warrants concessions and allowances. Standing in line is a waste of time best spent pursuing knowledge, inventing and creating. I should avail myself of the best medical treatment proffered by the most prominent medical authorities - lest the asset that is I be lost to Mankind. I should not be bothered with proofreading my articles (or even re-reading them) - these lowly jobs best be assigned to the less gifted. The devil is in paying precious attention to details.
Entitlement is sometimes justified in a Picasso or an Einstein. But I am neither. My achievements are grotesquely incommensurate with my overwhelming sense of entitlement. I am but a mediocre and forgettable scribbler who, at the age of 39, is a colossal under-achiever, if anything.
Of course, the feeling of supremacy often serves to mask a cancerous complex of inferiority. Moreover, I infect others with my projected grandiosity and their feedback constitutes the edifice upon which I construct my self esteem. I regulate my sense of self worth by rigidly insisting that I am above the madding crowd while deriving my narcissistic supply from this very thus despised source.
But there is a second angle to this abhorrence of the predictable. As a narcissist, I employ a host of Emotional Involvement Prevention Mechanisms (EIPM). Despising routine and avoiding it is one of these mechanisms. Their function is to prevent me from getting emotionally involved and, subsequently, hurt. Their application results in an "approach-avoidance repetition complex". The narcissist, fearing and loathing intimacy, stability and security - yet craving them - approaches and then avoids significant others or important tasks in a rapid succession of apparently inconsistent and disconnected behaviours.
Here is a partial (and truncated) list of other EIPMs. In this text - "objects" means "others".
From "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited":
"Emotional Involvement Preventive Measures
Personality and Conduct
- Lack of enthusiasm, anhedonia, and constant boredom.
- A wish to "vary", to "be free", to hop from one subject matter or object to another.
- Laziness, constantly present fatigue.
- Dysphoria to the point of depression - leads to reclusiveness, detachment, low energies.
- Repression of the affect and uniform emotional tint.
- Self-hatred disables capacity to love or to develop emotional involvement.
- Externalised transformations of aggression:
- Envy, rage, cynicism, vulgar honesty
- (all lead to dis-intimization and distancing and to pathological emotional and sexual communication)...
- Narcissistic compensatory and defence mechanisms: ...
- Grandiosity and grandiose fantasies
- (Feelings of) uniqueness
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