How narcissism became the modern plague

It's a testament of our time that one of the best movies of 2025, HBO's "The Mountainhead," has a "Dr. Strangelove" level of absurdity in its plotting, and yet feels almost understated in its satire of the ridiculousness of our era. (Short spoiler warning.) It follows four tech bros over a day in which the entire world literally falls into chaos and civil war, due to the release of disinformation-sowing social media tools, with the implication that millions of people are killed in 24 hours. But our billionaire protagonists — played by Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Cory Michael Smith, and Ramy Youssef — are only interested in leveraging the situation to gather more money, power, and status for themselves. Throughout, the characters routinely name-drop philosophers and authors they've obviously never read while indulging bizarre fantasies of living forever and ruling the universe as benevolent dictators. 

Still, "The Mountainhead" can't compete with reality. After all, an allegedly ketamine-addled Elon Musk callously cut life-saving aid for hundreds of thousands of people by destroying USAID, all while continuing to claim he's humanity's savior because he will someday colonize Mars. (He will not.) The movie works only because it's ruthless in its portrayal of the ego delusion that fuels so much of Silicon Valley's C-suites, as the tech industry enters its snake oil phase. Writer and director Jesse Armstrong never indulges the urge to humanize his narcissistic main characters by giving them secret soft sides or limits on their self-regard. At one point, the Musk stand-in character even asks if other people are real, and concludes they are not. 

Everywhere you look online these days, people are talking about narcissism. TikTok is replete with advice, most of it questionable, on how to tell if someone is a narcissist. The subreddit /raisedbynarcissists has over 1 million members. Social media in general is a place where accusations of the disorder fly wildly, and often unfairly. But it wasn't always like this. A decade ago, narcissism was a little-discussed personality disorder, especially compared to more stigmatized diagnoses, like sociopathy or borderline personality disorder. I'd say many people weren't even aware that it is a psychological condition. Even still to this day, the word "narcissist" gets misused to describe people who are merely snobbish or egotistical. Still, there's value in all this discourse. It's raised awareness that narcissism is a real psychological disorder, and helped a lot of people make sense of abuse or other relationship issues they've dealt with in the past.