u/FoxCitiesRando

I think this is tied back to my childhood, though it's hard to pinpoint exactly why. The biggest thing I can think of is that it's tied to my relationships with bystanders. The bystanders - adults and children - who stood by with glee watching someone struggle in a way they didn't. Struggling people can't compete and fight for jobs and resources the way healthy people can.

I've had an almost violent reaction to this phrase for as long as I can remember. A natural disaster happens. A crime with multiple casualties happens. An accident occurs. Someone gets cancer. Someone dies.

And then I hear it. Thank God my family is OK. Thank God we're all healthy. Thank God we don't live there. Thank God that didn't happen to us. That's the immediate reaction. And then maybe a lapsed, I guess it's terrible it happened to whoever it happened to.

But the initial reaction is the same. The same vacuum of empathy around someone experiencing the worst day in their life. Is it narcissism? Is it sociopathy? I just find that reaction/statement ghastly.

I made last year the year of evicting most of the narcissists from my life, and so far this year/Spring has also been great. Ended two relationships with friends with heavy narcissistic tendencies. One, my age, who strongly reminds me of my own father's intense covert behavior, particularly around children. A second, the age of my father, who exhibits many of the narcissistic tendencies of people in his generation.

I have to say, it's been very liberating. I've also participated in Spring Cleaning by decluttering my book collection of the last several decades (basically my entire life). I'm also livening up my living space by patronizing local art.

On the subject of narcissists, clearing out narcissistic relationships other than my parents is about all I can do because I already live hours and hours away from them. I did have a challenging past weekend, not due to having a narcissistic mother, but due to having a narcissistic father. It really is at the point where a one-day visit is in itself barely tolerable. It will probably never be practical for me to go full NC, sadly.

Hope everyone is doing well out there after what is always a challenging weekend.

I went in to the office almost every day of 2020. My building was 12 minutes away, almost totally abandoned, and I could go in with sandals and t-shirts. My home internet sucked so it kind of worked out.

I remember May of 2020 when everyone claimed this was the new way of working. Nothing would ever be the same. I grimaced every time I heard it and wondered if they'd ever met a PMC or corporate exec.

Fast forward to Thansgiving 2020 and I knew it would last at least through the next Summer. I upgraded my internet and started WFH.

My company, a Fortune 500 company, spent the next three years talking about how people could work from anywhere in the world. Times had changed. They were listening. Sure.

Then the bombshell hit two years ago. Return to office 4 days a week starting in four weeks. Four weeks after that, the company announced an eight week count down to mass layoffs. I survived.

Today, it's like Covid never even happened. The pissing match to be first person in the office. The fake busy-ness, the fake hurried-ness from everyone above the level of individual contributor. Manufactured corporate culture. Insincerity with every conversation.

Every thing worth hating in December 2019 about the modern workplace is back, and they're making up for lost time. There's a special F U in every quarterly financial release about stock buybacks when we haven't had a merit increase since the 🇷🇺/🇺🇦 war started.

Our company is making bank on the data center hysteria. The bribes for city council members must be working. RIP water supplies everywhere.

I just wish David Graeber was here to talk about all of this. Please check out his last book, Bullshit Jobs.

This could have been in r/ManagedByNarcissists or here, but given that I was raised by narcissists and I'm now an adult, I'm typing it here.

I'm in my 40's now. I had a covert, neglectful father and an enabler mother. I saw education and school as my only way out, so from the earliest age I applied myself, independent of my parents. I was near the top of my class.

I was the typical fake "gifted kid" who read and tested well and generally survived well. I also had zero practical skills, and seriously problematic health and social issues. I was a people pleaser and a problem solver for everyone else's issues. I grew up without defense mechanisms and barely started to learn them in my late 30's, out of sheer exhaustion at being exploited.

I got into an average college and my parents told me just before classes started that they weren't going to contribute. I went anyway, got a garbage degree because I had no idea what I was doing, and graduated with a boatload of student loans during the recession.

It took me a year to get a job, and I had to give up everything I knew in the process. I moved across the country to a place I'd never heard of, for an entry level corporate job mildly related to the graduate degree I earned, which was in a stupid field that was blowing up at the time. I've been here since, over 15 years.

It's been a perfectly straight trajectory from a directionless, unguided childhood making it up as I went along to a corporate "career" where I absorb and fix everyone else's problems without complaint, am endlessly overlooked, and have no real future ahead of me.

I'm in a place now, and have been since Covid, that is a total dead end. Apparently I am important enough not to get fired, but am so worthless that I can never be considered for another position. It's some kind of sweet spot of corporate death, and it's been going on for years.

My entire "career" has been a pattern of absorbing messes that no one else wanted to deal with. I investigate them, fix them, I automate them, and then I move on. I am the garbage receptacle or punching bag, depending on how you want to look at it.

All of this was perfectly set up by a childhood of not learning real skills, being exploited by my university, a lifetime of not having defense mechanisms, and being a world class people pleaser. I'm just starting to recover from that and I'm over 40.

Anyway. I'm just wondering if anyone else has had the experience of "surviving" a narcissistic childhood that launched them right into a predatory corporate environment. I guess these days, it's probably everyone raised by narcissists who is simply employed.