Sam Vaknin says: The narcissist often strikes people as laid back, parasitic, spoiled, and self-indulgent. Appearances can deceive. Narcissists are either compulsively driven over-achievers or chronic under-achieving wastrels. Most of them fail to make productive use of their capacities. Many narcissists avoid the now standard path of academic degree, a career, a family life. The disparity between the accomplishments of the narcissist and his grandiose fantasies and inflated self-image is the grandiosity gap. It is a staggering abyss and in the long run it is insupportable. It imposes onerous exigencies on the narcissist’s grasp on reality and his social skills. It pushes the narcissist either to seclusion or to a frenzy of acquisition — cars, women, wealth, power. Anything to sustain his self-image. No matter how successful the narcissist, the grandiosity gap can never be breached. The narcissist’s false self is so unrealistic, his expectations of himself are so way out there, his super-ego is so sadistic, his inner voices that criticize him, there is nothing the narcissist can do to extricate himself from the Kafka-esque trial that is his life.
The narcissist is a slave to his own inertia. Narcissist’s are one-state machines programmed to extract narcissistic supply from other people. They develop routines and this inability to change confines the narcissist and limits his horizons. Add to this toxic mixture the narcissist’s sense of entitlement, his visceral fear of failure, his need to be perceived as unique, one often ends up with a recipe for inaction.
The under-achieving narcissist dodges challenges, shirks tests, avoids competition and responsibility, sidesteps expectations, ducks duties, evades authority. The narcissist is afraid to fail. Doing something that everyone else does endangers my sense of uniqueness. Hence the narcissist’s apparent laziness, parasitism, and sense of entitlement with no commensurate accomplishment aggravates his milieu. People tend to regard such narcissists are spoiled brats.
The over-achiever narcissist’s hyper-activity is merely the flip side of the under-achiever’s inactivity. It is as fallacious, all smoke and mirrors. Narcissists often act outside the law. These narcissists whistle in the dark.
