The Narcissism of Small Differences

After a very tough week, I invited two dear friends round and we ate a decadent dinner on the floor in my sparsely decorated flat. They're the kind of friends who instantly make a room feel warmer the moment they step into it and honestly, I didn't know how much I needed to see them until they were there.

As we each went round sharing what was going on in our lives, it turned out we were all struggling with some pretty gnarly things and whilst the experiences were of course different, the emotional architecture beneath the experiences was strangely similar. Each story, in its own way, seemed to circle the same quiet questions: Am I doing life right? Am I behind? Am I choosing badly? Should this feel easier by now? Have I misunderstood what adulthood was supposed to be? Is this pain a sign that something is wrong, or simply the cost of being alive? Perhaps most tenderly of all: is it fair to expect life to feel more coherent than this?

It struck me how often the suffering we experience in our twenties blooms in different guises but grows from the same roots. So whilst someone might be experiencing heartbreak, another might be experiencing loneliness, restlessness, jealousy, longing (all of which are very different things), but so many of those feelings are bound up in the suspicion that everyone else has somehow received a kind of map or manual to adulthood that we somehow never got given. I think we rarely say it so plainly, but many of us are moving through life with the same low hum of uncertainty and angst, wondering whether the confusion we feel is evidence of failure or simply evidence that life is complex and no-one is doing it as cleanly as they appear.

Once we had all offered one another the usual remedies (try this, confront that, be honest about that, don't text that, listen to this song, listen to yourself, read this book, start the thing, end the thing, trust the timing, go to therapy, try this niche hobby) we began talking less about the specifics of our own lives and more about the shared texture of uncertainty itself.

This was when Freud’s phrase, the narcissism of small differences, came up. He does have a talent for making simple observations sound unnecessarily dramatic and convoluted, but the basic idea is very useful. Put plainly, it describes the tendency of people who are broadly similar to become strangely preoccupied with the small ways in which they differ. And we see it everywhere - neighbours feud more bitterly than strangers, siblings fight over things outsiders would find absurd and communities with shared language, customs and history often fixate on tiny points of separation. Essentially what unsettles us most is not vast differences but small gaps in near-sameness, perhaps best described as almost-sameness-interrupted.

I have never felt this more strongly than in my twenties (and I choose, for now, not to speculate about what thirty might bring...).

Your twenties are full of people who resemble you closely enough to function as mirrors: friends with the same education, the same city, the same cultural references, the same politics (sometimes..), the same anxieties, the same hopes. You move through life among people whose lives could plausibly have been your own had a few variables shifted and you sit there thinking if I'd just had one different relationship, one different boss, one different act of courage, one different inheritance, one different wound then would I be happier, would I feel calmer, would this all just be a little bit easier?

Because of that proximity, the small differences can feel enormous. There might be that friend who is just a little more disciplined than you or the friend whose career has accelerated slightly faster than yours or the friend who is engaged, married etc. On a deeper level there might be a friend who shares your values but performs them entirely differently, or a friend who just simply seems to carry "adulthood" more naturally. This is not to say we shouldn't celebrate the happiness or in deed the “beingness" of our friends (I love doing so) but so often that happiness can feel like evidence against your own timeline, revealing all the roads you haven't taken and all the versions of yourself you could have been.

I think this is one reason friendships in your twenties can feel so emotionally charged. Everyone is still becoming, nothing feels settled, careers are beginning or stalling or excelling, relationships are forming or collapsing, money is scarce or suddenly abundant. Some people are finding discipline, others are losing themselves, most are doing both in alternating cycles. Identity is still wet paint, so when we encounter someone very like us who has arranged themselves differently, it can feel less like meeting another person and more like being confronted by a rival draft of our own life.

But last night we also talked about something more forgiving and perhaps more important: mutual incomprehension.

By a certain age, you realize that even your closest friends do not fully understand you, not because they are careless, and not because the friendship has failed, but because no one can entirely enter the private weather system of another person’s life or mind. So they may know the facts of your life and can be fantastic in trying to understand your emotions, but they do not know what it feels like to wake up inside your anxiety on a Tuesday morning and they do not know the precise shape of your loneliness or longing, nor the private logic behind decisions that looked irrational from the outside. Beyond this, they also cannot know how certain memories live in your body, or how tired you have sometimes been and you cannot know these things about them either.

There is something sad in this realisation at first, but only because it rubs against the fantasy many of us carry into adulthood: that eventually we will find the right friends, the right partner, the right language, and finally experience the relief of being entirely known. Instead, we discover that love and misunderstanding often live side by side. People can adore you and still misread you and stand beside you for years without ever fully grasping what a particular season of your life felt like.

However, there is a beautiful freedom in this as well, because once you stop expecting total comprehension, friendship becomes much easier to breathe inside. You no longer need every choice to be endorsed, every emotion translated, every silence interpreted correctly and you can let people be partial knowers and in turn be more comfortable with being a partial knower yourself. This feels especially important in your twenties, when so much distress comes from asking impossible things of one another. And yes we're back to my previous blog on expectations! If we expect our friends to validate every new version of ourselves then of course we'll interpret misunderstanding as rejection and asymetery as failure.

I think peace actually comes from softer expectations. What if the friend who irritates you is not your enemy, but simply too close to one of your insecurities? What if the person who cannot understand your decision still loves you deeply? What if some distance is not failure, but the natural condition of being separate selves? What if intimacy is not the absence of mystery, but loyalty in its presence?

Looking around the table last night, I felt overwhelmed with gratitude for those friends because in spite of everything they have gone through, and all the ways we have each changed, they continue to offer that platform to come home to and remind me that misunderstanding is survivable, comparison is ordinary, and love does not require perfect symmetry.