One lunch period back in the fifth grade, I and a group of other kids, I wouldn’t exactly call them friends as I don’t remember a single one of their names, were sitting around the ugly blue tables trying to avoid having to go out in the cold as was required after having finished lunch. One of the kids was showing to my envy and partial amazement that he had a whole twenty-dollar bill with him. Another kid at the table said that he had one at home. Not wanting to be left out, I then said I had a thousand-dollar bill at home and hoped no one would ask where I got it. They didn’t. But the kid with the twenty-dollar bill said he had fifty thousand dollars at home. I might have made up the thousand dollars, but fifty thousand dollars had to be for real.
Since that time, I’ve become an expert on bragging, and I’ve realized that society considers openly bragging and showing off to be uncouth and even antisocial, whether or not the underlying claim is true. That’s why adults don’t brag as openly as children. Instead, adults naturally adapt to be more subtle in their boasting. They can’t brag about how much money they have but they can drive a car or wear clothes that let you know. Buying a car out of one’s normal price range is the adult version of claiming they have a pile of money at home. For you to show off like this it could cost tens of thousands of dollars. But now, with my special set of techniques and skills, you can learn to brag more effectively while saving money. I can teach you how to let people know how great you are, even if you’re not.
I get that you might be reluctant to brag openly, there is a social stigma around it. But just remember: you are the center of your visible universe, telling people about it is point of all this bragging. Doesn’t that put you above society’s silly rules? Most people are building their pride and showing off anyway, what right to they have to judge you for not doing it their way? Bragging is the cornerstone of our communication. Without it, we might not have anything to talk about. I believe that when our ancient ancestors were developing linguistic communication, the first things they said were not practical things, they were more like “me big,” “me strong,” “me kill lion,” and “me eat whole hippopotamus.” Even in this paragraph, I’m bragging about how brilliant I am for coming up with that theory. That’s why I’m going to ignore the theory’s obvious flaws.
Have you ever observed people swapping wisdom teeth stories or even told one yourself? There’s no reason for anyone to feel pride about what disgusting things the oral surgeon did to their face, yet whenever someone tells about their wisdom tooth removal, some other person is compelled to jump in and assert that their wisdom tooth removal was more difficult, more bloody, and more extraordinary for some reason. They can’t help but brag, even when it doesn’t make sense. And FYI: I had all four wisdom teeth removed, it took almost four hours, the bottom two were impacted with the one on the right wound around the nerve so they had to cut it in half before removing it and the one on the left actually having a nerve going through it so they had to just cut off most of the wisdom tooth and leave part of it in there permanently. I had it done just a few months ago, and before that I had to go many years without a story to interject into the wisdom tooth non-conversation conversations people seem to have way more often than is reasonable.
So is all storytelling just bragging? When people tell competitive wisdom tooth stories they are asserting not their wealth or abilities, but the range and intensity of their experience. People do this with stories that didn’t even happen to them, stories of a non-dental nature they just happened to hear. More than once I’ve been caught in an impromptu “YouTube party,” in which everyone proudly shows everyone else boring videos that they think are funny. The competitive nature of these events means no one can come out looking better than anyone else, so when you tell bragging stories you should find a way to weave them into conversation in way that doesn’t encourage other people to compete and tell their own story. If someone tries to compete, just talk over them. Might makes right.
What do you have to be prideful of? That’s up to you. People can be prideful about whatever they want! Even if I weren’t so good looking, hyper-intelligent, and a classy dresser, I could still feel pride for having the coolest record collection in the world. The great thing about this kind of pride is that it’s subjective. Some other collector might have the rarest mint condition first-issue Beatles records worth thousands of dollars, but my record collection is still better because I have every single They Might Be Giants lp.
You can apply this subjective pride to anything subjective, even your tastes and beliefs. Some people’s way of bragging is to tell you their political beliefs. After all, my beliefs happen to be exactly the right ones, so I’m therefore very good at having beliefs. I’m actually the best at it, because no one has the exact same beliefs as me and those beliefs that I have are right.
I know a few serious car guys. One of them spends most of his free time and money on buying, modifying, and maintaining cars so he can show them off at the big car show every year in Vegas. He’s proud of his cars, and I once had a two-hour one-sided conversation with him about his Corvette and its triple fuel-injected hyper-whatever-6000. I got sick of it pretty fast, and after giving up after an hour of trying to get a word in edgewise I started to entertain the possibility that his whole reason for collecting cars was so that he could brag about them later. I imagine that when he’s working on the engine, he’s picturing himself telling someone else about it later. Somehow, it never occurs to him that people might not care about his engine or whatever other parts he’s added to his car.
As I’ve sat here writing this on the AMD Ryzen 7 3800x 8 core/16 thread processor clocked to 4400 MHz in my custom-built desktop computer which has 20 tb of hard drives, 32 gb of 3200 MHz DDR4 ram, an AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT gpu, and about 30 usb ports that I built with a multizone rgb mood lighting system, I have increasingly realized what a fine and subtle art bragging can be. If you master it, you too can slip information about your own skills and abilities without appearing to boast about yourself.
It is important in the modern economy to let others know about your more discreet skills and traits without appearing to be as self-centered as everyone else in the universe. It also feels good and is a lot of fun! A great bragging skill to learn is to disguise a boast as a compliment to whoever you’re bragging at. Congratulations to you for reading about that sophisticated and brilliant idea I just came up with right off the top of my head with no outside help because I’m so sophisticated and brilliant and good looking.
In the social order that we share, being the best is about letting people know you’re the best, that’s why we invented jewelry and expensive shoes. Sociologists who study income inequality have concluded that the majority of people would be happier if everyone wealthier than them were brought down to their level, even if it would lower their wealth as well. Psychologists who study childhood bullying believe that our social brains try to make us feel better off by making ourselves feel comparatively better than others. They also say that this is a negative behavior that can lead to long term destructive tendencies. I say they’re just jealous.
Another great trick to subtly build yourself up by comparison to your neighbors is to disguise your boasts as tastes. It’s like the political thing, but on a smaller scale. For example, my favorite opera is John Adams’s Nixon in China. This shows that in some ways I’m better than all you all, because most of you don’t even have a favorite opera, let alone one that’s both politically sophisticated and rooted in the avant-garde musical techniques of minimalism. That usually works. It helps to find ways to steer the conversation toward such things so that you can brag about, and I’m actually pretty good at that.
By the way, using the word “actually” actually helps camouflage boasts, because it seems like you’re comparing the boast to your many flaws that you’ve never mentioned. That way you can be humble and brag at the same time. I’m actually kind of an expert at that.
There’s one final technique of bragging to master, and you will have to bring all your skills if you want to make it work. It will require years of practice for you to master this technique at my level, and you’ll probably never be able to do so anyway. The greatest bragging technique is pretending to be joke-bragging as part of a humorous persona in an almost self-deprecating way while actually meaning every single word.
Maybe.
Written March 2020
adurbin.com 