Behavioral Crackers

There is an old comedy argument about whether soup counts as a meal. The question sounds ridiculous until somebody starts presenting evidence. Was it a cup or a bowl? Was there bread? Were crackers involved? How substantial was the soup? Suddenly a perfectly ordinary lunch has become a classification hearing.

We do the same thing with people now, except the menu has been replaced by psychology vocabulary and everybody on the internet has apparently been issued a clipboard.

Someone talks about themselves too much. Cracker. Someone hates being criticized. Cracker. Someone posts a flattering photo. Cracker. Someone is selfish during an argument, needs reassurance, interrupts, wants attention, sets a boundary badly, dominates a conversation, sulks when ignored, or has the audacity to believe they were right about something. More crackers enter the bowl. Eventually somebody looks down at the collection and announces that the soup has become narcissism.

That is the question that interests me: when, exactly, did that happen?

Not because narcissism is imaginary, harmless, or undeserving of serious attention. Quite the opposite. If a psychological concept describes a real and damaging pattern, it deserves better than being turned into seasoning. The more casually we sprinkle the word over every difficult person, selfish moment, ugly breakup, bad boss, vain acquaintance, and ex who failed to provide the desired amount of closure, the harder it becomes to know what anyone means when they use it.

A trait is not automatically a pattern. A pattern is not automatically a disorder. A behavior can be real, harmful, and worth confronting without requiring a diagnosis to make it count. Those distinctions are not evasions. They are the difference between describing what happened and trying to name the entire person from one spoonful.

This is where the behavioral crackers become useful. Each one may tell us something. Excessive need for admiration tells us something. Lack of empathy tells us something. Entitlement tells us something. Manipulation, exploitation, grandiosity, hypersensitivity to criticism, and chronic self-centering all tell us something too. But the presence of an ingredient does not settle the recipe. Human beings are inconveniently capable of displaying unattractive traits without reorganizing their entire personality around them.

Most of us have probably crumbled a cracker into the bowl at some point. We have been vain. We have wanted praise. We have made a conversation about ourselves. We have reacted badly to criticism. We have failed to notice somebody else's needs because our own were louder. We have behaved as though our inconvenience was the central event in the room. None of this is especially flattering, but ordinary human selfishness should not require a clinical category before we are allowed to admit it exists.

The internet dislikes this kind of ambiguity because ambiguity is terrible for labeling. A label wants closure. It wants the story to snap into place. Once somebody becomes a narcissist, the confusing behavior acquires a theory. The contradictions become predictable. The past gets reinterpreted. The future becomes easier to narrate. The label can provide genuine relief when it finally gives language to a pattern somebody has struggled to understand. It can also become a machine that explains everything because we have stopped asking whether everything needs the same explanation.

That is the danger of a very satisfying bowl of soup. Once you decide what it is, every cracker starts looking like confirmation.

The better question is not, “How many crackers before I am allowed to use the word?” There is no diagnostic loyalty card where the tenth stamp earns a personality disorder. The better questions are about pattern, persistence, context, flexibility, impact, and function. Does the behavior appear repeatedly across situations and relationships? Is it rigid or does the person adapt? Does it consistently harm other people? Can the person recognize the harm? Can they take responsibility? Is the behavior a temporary response to stress, fear, insecurity, grief, status threat, or conflict, or is it a durable way of moving through the world? Those are harder questions because they do not fit on a meme.

They also require more humility. A person can be controlling without having a personality disorder. A person can be emotionally immature without having a personality disorder. A person can be arrogant, cruel, insecure, manipulative, exhausting, self-absorbed, defensive, needy, competitive, or simply an asshole without us converting the adjective into a diagnosis. Sometimes the plain-language description is not less serious. It is more accurate.

This matters for the people on the receiving end too. If someone repeatedly mistreats you, you do not need to win a diagnostic argument before you are allowed to respond. You can say the behavior is unacceptable. You can leave. You can set a boundary. You can decide that the relationship costs too much. You do not need a certificate proving that the soup meets formal entrée requirements before you are allowed to stop eating it.

That may be one of the strangest effects of pop psychology: we sometimes act as though harm only becomes legitimate once we can name the mechanism behind it. Someone says, “They constantly belittle me, refuse responsibility, and punish disagreement,” and the conversation immediately becomes, “Do you think they are a narcissist?” Maybe. Maybe not. But we have already been handed three verbs that deserve attention.

The verbs are often more useful than the noun because the noun asks us to classify the person, and the verbs ask us to observe the behavior. The noun can become a permanent identity. The verbs can become evidence. The noun invites debate about whether we have met the threshold. The verbs tell us what needs to change, what needs to stop, or what we may need to protect ourselves from.

That does not mean diagnosis has no value. Clinical diagnosis exists for reasons far more substantial than winning arguments about difficult relatives. Qualified professionals look for enduring patterns, impairment, history, context, and diagnostic criteria because personality is complicated and human behavior is noisy. The point is not that ordinary people should never notice patterns. The point is that noticing patterns and naming disorders are different levels of work.

I noticed the comedy because we already understand this everywhere else. If you found one crouton on the floor, you would not announce that the building had become a Caesar salad. If your car made one strange noise, you would not diagnose the transmission from the parking lot and update its LinkedIn profile accordingly. Yet one ugly behavior can now trigger a complete psychological biography before the argument is even over.

We are desperate for explanatory certainty, especially when another person has confused or hurt us. That desire deserves compassion. Uncertainty is uncomfortable. A label can make chaos feel organized. But clarity bought too cheaply has its own cost. It can flatten people, obscure other explanations, and turn every new interaction into evidence for a conclusion that has already been reached.

So perhaps the bowl deserves a slower inspection.

What is actually in it? Which ingredients keep appearing? Who put them there? Are we looking at one bad serving or the house recipe? Does the person behave differently when circumstances change? What happens when somebody points out the problem? Does accountability enter the room, or does the entire kitchen somehow become somebody else's fault?

Those questions are less satisfying than slapping a label on the menu, but they are more revealing. They keep us close to observable behavior without pretending that observation alone makes us clinicians. They leave room for complexity without demanding that anybody tolerate harm.

And they preserve the seriousness of the word itself.

Narcissism should mean something. Narcissistic Personality Disorder should mean something even more specific. If every piece of selfishness gets crumbled into the same bowl, eventually we are no longer discussing psychology. We are just serving soup with an unreasonable amount of crackers.

Which may still be a meal but it is not automatically a diagnosis.