Ego Is a Fart That Narcissists Use to Fly
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I have spent fifteen years in American healthcare research, a field where the ego is not merely a personality trait but a professional instrument, calibrated daily, polished hourly, and deployed in meetings with the subtlety of a brass band entering a library. But nothing—nothing—in the hallowed halls of academic medicine prepared me for the open sewer of self-congratulation that is LinkedIn, where the ego is not merely a fart but a renewable resource, a biofuel of bullshit lifting the smug and the glib into the stratosphere of superconfidence, there to hover, visible to all, stinking up the digital firmament with the aromatic certainty of their own indispensable flatulence.
These are the new aviators. The captains of industry who have never captained anything but a webinar. The thought leaders who have never had a thought that could not be summarized in seven carousel slides, the seventh naturally being FOLLOW ME FOR MORE INSIGHTS. The influencers who influence nothing measurable except the nausea of their audience. They have mastered the aerodynamics of aroma, the calculus of stench, and they fly—oh, how they fly—on the thermals of their own decomposition, rising above the rest of us, the groundlings, the hunchbacks of uncertainty, who remain earthbound under the terrible gravitational burden of occasionally wondering whether we might be wrong.
Before the psychiatric police arrive with their clipboards: I use “narcissist” here in the ancient civilian sense of a person magnificently enamored of himself, not as a remote diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder from a LinkedIn post. Clinical NPD is an actual psychiatric diagnosis requiring a persistent pattern, history, impairment, and professional assessment. The fellow who announces that he is “humbled and honored” to have received an award he nominated himself for may simply be an asshole. Science must leave room for the differential diagnosis.
Consider the physics. A real airplane does not remain aloft merely because somebody chants Bernoulli beneath the wing. Lift emerges from the pressure field around the wing and the downward deflection of air; Newton and Bernoulli are not rival religions but different descriptions of the same inconvenient atmosphere. The LinkedIn aviator has simplified the engineering. He creates pressure beneath himself by compressing everybody else’s anxieties, expectations, insecurities, job searches, layoffs and fear of professional irrelevance, while keeping the pressure above wonderfully thin, where accountability floats untethered like a weather balloon that has slipped from the hand of a child. Shame is jettisoned first. Doubt follows. Payload reduced. Altitude achieved.
I have watched them, these methane-driven messiahs, these flatulent pharaohs of the feed, as they ascend. They do not merely post; they achieve altitude. They do not merely share; they crop-dust the landscape of reality with aromatic certainty, ensuring that nothing grows in their shadow except more of themselves, smaller replicas, hungry apprentices studying the aerodynamics of aroma, the pedagogy of putrescence. It is a mentorship of malodor, a masterclass in gaseous arts, and the comments section fills immediately with the desperate, the aspiring, the ground crew of the digital age:
Powerful.
This resonated.
Needed this today.
So true, brother.
Meanwhile somebody has merely written that waking at 4:17 a.m. taught him five lessons about enterprise SaaS.
The mathematics of narcissistic flight is deceptively simple, chiefly because I have invented it.
Let us define the Ego Coefficient, , not in the “standard unit of the Dunning-Kruger scale,” because no such scale or unit exists despite the Internet having converted a 1999 psychology paper into something resembling a household thermometer, but simply as:
where is self-reported competence and is demonstrated competence.
When , the organism remains approximately terrestrial.
When , the unfortunate creature may actually know something.
When , check the ceiling.
The Dunning-Kruger paper itself was rather more modest than the meme that ate it. Kruger and Dunning found, in several tasks involving humor, grammar, and logic, that low performers substantially overestimated their performance and that deficits in skill could also impair the ability to recognize those deficits. They did not discover a universal law stating that every confident idiot is too stupid to know he is an idiot, nor did they provide LinkedIn with a diagnostic dipstick. Humanity supplied that part later.
For aerodynamic purposes we may now commit a second felony against mathematics and write:
where is the number of enablers in the immediate vicinity, the entirely fictitious gas constant of grandiosity, the absolute temperature of self-regard, and the molecular weight of conscience. This is not physics. It is what happens when the ideal gas law drinks three pegs, opens LinkedIn, and begins consulting.
As , the model predicts not merely flight but levitation: the extraordinary suspension of disbelief that permits a man to stand before a camera phone and deliver a sermon on “hustle” and “grind” while the only thing being ground is the patience of everyone who has ever had to work with him.
The smugness is a particular vintage. It is not confidence. Confidence is a solid thing, usually quieter than advertised, produced by repeated collisions with reality and the discovery that one can survive them. Superconfidence is a gas. Confidence says, I think I can do this. Superconfidence says, I have discovered the Seven Immutable Laws of Leadership because three months ago somebody promoted me to Regional Associate Deputy Vice Something.
The glibness is the exhaust valve.
Out comes the smooth, practiced, nutritionally empty stream of aphorisms, frameworks and hashtags. Failure is feedback. Comfort zones are where dreams go to die. Your network is your net worth. Leaders eat adversity for breakfast. Winners execute while losers make excuses. Somewhere Marcus Aurelius, who endured plague, war, political treachery and the death of several children, is being quoted beneath a photograph of a man leaning against a rented Mercedes.
They speak the language of the TED Talk after it has been fed through a photocopier forty-seven times: disruption, resilience, ten-x, mindset, authenticity, intentionality, transformation, leverage, purpose, journey. Every word is another molecule entering the envelope. Every sentence produces buoyancy. Eventually the speaker is no longer communicating information at all. He is inflating.
I have been crop-dusted. I have opened the app and been blasted by the emissions of a connection who has just “disrupted” an industry by attending a webinar, “leveraged synergies” by changing his profile photograph, and “crushed it” by crushing nothing more substantial than the will to live of everyone in his network. The experience is not unique. It merely feels epidemiological.
The Centers for Disease Control does not track Narcissistic Flatulence Syndrome, because Narcissistic Flatulence Syndrome does not exist, although one hesitates to give the wellness industry ideas. Its imaginary symptoms would include sudden urges to quote oneself, chronic inability to say “I was wrong,” episodic attacks of photographed gratitude, compulsive production of numbered lessons, and acute inflammation of the personal brand. There would be no vaccine. The principal intervention would remain the mute button, with blocking reserved for refractory disease.
The word “ego,” incidentally, is already funny before Freud gets anywhere near it. Latin ego simply means “I,” the nominative first-person singular pronoun. Contrary to what I would prefer for the joke, it does not stand majestically alone refusing grammatical accountability; Latin happily declines it into mei, mihi, me, and me. Ancient Greek has its cousin egō, also “I,” although Greek often has no need to say it because the verb ending already tells you who is acting. The Greeks were therefore capable of leaving the “I” unstated, a technological achievement LinkedIn has yet to reproduce.
Freud, to complicate matters further, did not sit in Vienna writing solemnly about the Latin “ego.” His 1923 book was Das Ich und das Es—literally, roughly, “The I and the It.” The familiar Latinate English vocabulary of ego and id came through the psychoanalytic translation tradition. Thus an ordinary pronoun meaning “I” acquired a consulting practice, a leather couch, several theoretical departments, and eventually a profile banner reading THOUGHT LEADER | VISIONARY | HUMAN.
Language, like gas, expands to fill the available container.
Narcissism underwent something similar. In ordinary speech it now covers everyone from the clinically grandiose to the colleague who uses his own photograph as his phone wallpaper. Psychology is less promiscuous. Narcissistic traits exist on continua; questionnaires such as the Narcissistic Personality Inventory have been used to study aspects such as entitlement, exhibitionism, superiority and self-sufficiency, but a personality inventory is not a magic DSM wand, and an irritating personality is not automatically a personality disorder.
This distinction matters because satire should exaggerate reality, not quietly replace it.
The recovery from pathological narcissism, where it genuinely exists, is also less theatrically hopeless than I had first written it. Psychotherapy can help some people, and outcomes vary with severity, associated problems, circumstances, and—rather inconveniently—whether the person sees any reason to change. There is no elegant exorcism of ego. One does not vomit out the demon at dawn and become humble before breakfast.
For the rest of us, the task is less clinical and more digestive. The ego must be metabolized. Some of its gas must be converted into something useful: confidence where competence exists, embarrassment where it does not, curiosity when uncertain, and perhaps the occasional miraculous sentence, “I don’t know.”
This is painful work.
It involves sitting with the possibility of one’s own ordinariness without immediately founding a newsletter about it. It means confronting the fact that one is not a statistical category called Extraordinary People but a human datum drawn from the same noisy distribution as everybody else, unusually good at a few things, embarrassing at several, average at most, and catastrophically unaware of some defect currently visible to everyone except oneself.
The LinkedIn aviator cannot tolerate this possibility. To him, the bell curve is a personal insult, regression toward the mean a conspiracy against his brand, and a confidence interval merely the distance between two keynote appearances. He would rather fly on fumes than walk on solid ground.
And so they ascend, these flatulent Icaruses, these gaseous gods of the gig economy, rising not toward the sun but toward the ceiling of their own perception, where they bump gently, repeatedly, leaving greasy marks on the tiles of the algorithm.
The strange thing is that the system genuinely rewards some of it.
Social platforms do not possess a little narcissism detector that turns a brass lever marked AMPLIFY ASSHOLE. They optimize for measurable behavior—attention, reactions, comments, shares, viewing time, whatever objectives and ranking systems happen to be operating beneath the floorboards—and certainty performs beautifully in an environment where hesitation occupies extra characters. “Here are seven things I know” travels more efficiently than “Here are seven things I suspect, numbers two and five may be wrong, and the literature is mixed on six.”
Nuance has terrible aerodynamics.
Certainty is streamlined.
This is why the feed gradually acquires the epistemological character of a political rally conducted inside a management-consulting brochure. Everyone is sure. Everyone has learned something profound this morning. Everyone has a framework. Nobody appears to have spent Wednesday staring at a spreadsheet thinking, Christ, I have absolutely no idea what is happening.
Yet that Wednesday is where most actual work lives.
I know that terrain. Research teaches a man certain humiliations if he remains around long enough. The model fails. The data refuse to cooperate. The elegant hypothesis walks directly into a wall. The supposedly obvious result vanishes after adjustment. Somebody younger notices the error in your code. Somebody quieter asks the question you should have asked three weeks ago. Reality possesses no LinkedIn account and therefore feels no obligation to protect your personal brand.
That, perhaps, is why competence so often looks less magnificent from the inside than ignorance imagines it from the outside. The closer you stand to a difficult problem, the more machinery becomes visible: exceptions, assumptions, boundary conditions, missing data, uncertainty, things nobody knows. From far away the cathedral looks finished. Up close there is scaffolding everywhere and somebody has misplaced a wrench.
The narcissistic performance solves this unpleasantness by simply increasing altitude. From high enough above the problem, details disappear.
At thirty thousand feet every spreadsheet is strategy.
At forty thousand feet every opinion is vision.
At fifty thousand feet you become a futurist.
Eventually oxygen becomes an issue.
I have concluded that the LinkedIn narcissist does not really fly. He merely declines to participate in gravity. It is a policy decision, not a physical achievement, and like many policy decisions made in isolation from reality, it works magnificently until reality sends an invoice.
The ego is not a wing. It is not an engine. It is certainly not a credential.
It is an ancient pronoun that acquired an enormous wardrobe.
We are all emitters. This is the uncomfortable equality beneath the joke. To be human is to be a damp sack of carbon chemistry producing gases, liquids, errors, memories, rationalizations and, on unusually good afternoons, consciousness. Nobody escapes the plumbing. Nobody escapes self-deception either. The difference between tolerable and intolerable may not be who possesses an ego but who periodically catches the bastard at work.
The tolerable person says: I may be full of it. Let me check.
The unbearable person says: I am full of it. Behold, I am flying.
Then comes the post.
Five Lessons I Learned While Airborne.
Lesson one: believe in yourself.
Lesson two: ignore the haters.
Lesson three: surround yourself with people who elevate you.
Lesson four: never stop growing.
Lesson five: subscribe to my newsletter.
And beneath it come the little applauding hands.
Powerful.
Needed this.
So true.
Meanwhile the rest of us remain down here in the troposphere, walking about with our ordinary shoes, carrying our uncertainty like groceries, doing the unphotogenic work of revising opinions and correcting mistakes, occasionally emitting something regrettable and having the decency not to call it thought leadership.
Perhaps that is enough.
The ego is a fart that narcissists use to fly.
The rest of us just open a window.
P.S. References: Freud, S. (1923/1961). The Ego and the Id, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 19; Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (1999). “Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1121–1134; Raskin, R., & Terry, H. (1988). “A principal-components analysis of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory and further evidence of its construct validity.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(5), 890–902; American Psychiatric Association. (2022). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th ed., text revision.
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