All mythologies tell the same stories, all ancient wisdom painted the same archetypes. modified to resonate with the culture, climate, and societal norms of the time.

The myth of Narcissus is probably one of the better-known in modern times. Like all ancient archetypes it still applies to modern society. Despite our technological and scientific advances, we have remained vulnerable to the same sins that plagued the ancients, in some cases even more so due to the world we’ve created for ourselves.

We’ve named a whole personality disorder after Narcissus, his legend living on in a simplified version in current times: his death brought on by his love of self. But his fall was not caused simply by looking at his own reflection. Narcissus was aware of his beauty prior to this, his pride causing him to cruelly reject the advances of both males and females, in some cases leading to the rejected committing suicide. His behaviour attracted the attention of Nemesis, goddess of revenge and aspect of Aphrodite, through (in Ovid’s Metamorphoses) the sadness of Echo the nymph, another victim of Narcissus’ rebuff. Thus Nemesis punished him to “know himself” and fall in love with his reflection, without realizing that what he saw was merely an image, not his actual self. Since the grasp of self-love was so powerful, he cast aside his other needs and eventually withered away and died.

While this particular myth was mainly meant to tackle the issue of mankind being distracted by materialism and physicality to the detriment of the spiritual nature, a hellenized variation of one of the Hindu myths of Shakti – who started dancing and taken in by the ecstasy forgot who she was and was eventually overcome by sadness, most people reading this might not have mystical views of existence, so the tangent here will be going in a more earthly direction.

Initially the term “narcissism” was coined by Havelock Ellis to describe excessive masturbation, and was later expanded by Freud to encompass preoccupation with oneself at the expense of others. This is merely an extreme of what is known as “healthy narcissism” a concept developed to cover Freud’s notion which considers narcissism a natural part of human makeup that is deterring to meaningful relationships only when excessive. In this day and age we are experiencing different dimensions of narcissism, and again, not going into the tangent of social media and the fake images created of and for ourselves, which has decalibrated not only the collective view, but also the individual perception of the self, because there is plenty of material out there dealing with that.

The aim here is self-awareness. Since the society we created has turned many of us into maladjusted beings from one perspective or the other, the past few years have seen a rise in the “acceptance of self” movement. We are flooded by messages of “self-love” and acceptance, where we are encouraged to see past our flaws, physical or otherwise, and accept our past wrong-doings, practicing self-forgiveness. While the message is constructive and should be heard, caution is advised as it leaves room for an even bigger lapse, that of unfounded self-love based on disregard for others’ feelings. While self-esteem should by all means be encouraged, it should as all other aspects of life be balanced. Forgiving yourself does not mean accepting mistakes only to repeat them at a later time, but accepting that you have wronged and looking for ways of mending it.

Attaining this can only be done through self-awareness. This is not cultivated in a day, it is something to be worked on, an assessment of strengths and flaws which requires an add-on of objectivity to our subjective lens. Of course this is a tricky path to walk, as over-analyzing oneself can bring the opposite pole of what was just described, where the flaws are exaggerated, creating low self-esteem, which like narcissism is a different facet of low self-awareness, and would still leave us staring off into the water. As Howard Sasportas put it “we cannot transform that which we condemn.”

Perhaps instead of focusing on how beautiful, smart and blameless we are (or the total opposite) we should be looking at the processes that brought us to those conclusions, and develop techniques which will make us less prone to lying to the beings which we spend the most time with: ourselves.