One of the most aggravating parts of the media and marketing world I work in is the gurus and experts (charlatans is probably a better word). To them, everything is a theory or a chance to pontificate. Everything can be simplified and extrapolated. None of the natural laws—diminishing returns, unintended consequences, regression to the mean—ever seem to exist.

It’s less messy to think that way, sure. And comforting. It may even briefly be lucrative. But that is not how it really works. As much as a part of me wishes I could live in that universe, I don’t and can’t. It’s not how you get things done.

“See, I have the advantage of having found out how hard it is to get to really know something, how careful you have to be about checking the experiments, how easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself. I know what it really means to know something. And therefore, I see how it is that they get their information and I can’t believe that they know it—they haven’t done the work necessary, they haven’t done the checks necessary, they haven’t done the care necessary. I have a great suspicion that they don’t know how this stuff is done and they are intimidating people by it.”

That is Richard Feynman. What he’s talking about is the flipness of pseudo-science and the false confidence of delusion. Everything about the internet enables those impulses. From the segmentation to the lack of accountability, we forget what it really takes to know something. How hard it is to be truly sure.

That comes from rigor and discipline. From humility and understatement.  It comes practices, checklists, from methods, and the scientific method. It comes from staying up late reading, not blogging. It comes from having deep connections with a handful of smart people who push you to be better, not networking. It comes from separating ideas from your identity—so you can pick up, discard, pick up, rearrange, discard and pick them up at whim.

To really study something almost inevitably eliminates the desire to talk about it. You don’t need to intimidate other people because you’re too busy checking your own assumptions to bother worrying about theirs. You’re not out trying to sell your theory to random people on the internet (and calling it Ryan’s Law or some indulgent shit) because you’re selling it to people who matter—people who actually pay you for your ideas.

All this takes time. That is, it can’t be done in real-time. So be patient and quiet and do the work. Check the experiments and put in the care. Then you start to know what it really means to know something.

Someone hurt you. Or so it feels. Why? They didn’t mean to. What they said/did had nothing to do with you. Yet it hurts all the same.

Welcome to narcissistic injury. To paraphrase Epicurus, we—the narcissistically inclined—live in an unwalled city. Everything is a threat to the fragile self. Illusions, accomplishments, these are not defenses. Not when you’ve got the special, sensitive antennae trained to receive (and create) the signals that challenge your precarious balancing act.

They hang out with somebody else, it means they don’t want to hang out with you. They don’t ask how you were feeling, it’s because you don’t matter. They do something you don’t like, it’s because they know you don’t like it and did it anyway. And these are the straightforward, almost-logical kinds of slights. From there it descends into hopelessly opaque list of unrelated and seemingly banal events with one commonality: a twisted, selfish interpretation that it somehow said something about me (and how woefully awry things went from that faulty premise)

It is a miserable way to live, whatever the degree of your affliction. Deep down this is all a fear about  existence. And to have trivial events make you feel as though you do not exist, is a constant and unavoidable source of aggravation (torture). That’s the consequence of trying to determine your identity through external things—making it possible for it to be challenged by the things that other people say or do, no matter how unrelated to you they actually are. So go the risks of allowing your identity to be anything but secure and intrinsic (to say nothing of delusions of grandiosity).

The solution, well, I don’t know if there is one. But it seems to get better with therapy—rigorous, introspective and committed therapy. It is possible to rewire the brain, but it takes a lot of work. For me, practicing a different take on empathy has been helpful (or at least, humbling). To realize that other people have as much to wrongly interpret from your actions as you do from theirs. And that there is a feedback loop between these worldviews. So too, with contemptuous expressions. The less you puff, the less there is to pop.

Aware of all this, you must do your best to just stop, and take things as they are. Remind yourself: this doesn’t say anything about me—because external things cannot—and, even if it literally did, I don’t have to let it bother me. I don’t need to hear it, let alone agree with it. It has nothing to do with my identity, my existence or anything foolish like that. Because narcissistic injury is by definition a self-injury. Figure out why you feel the need to inflict it.