so i think most people perceive me as pretty arrogant. part of this is the fact that i'm sort of well-known as a former child prodigy (although this of course is less and less relevant over time; well, it's never been relevant to me, but it's less and less the first thing people tell others about me.) you would perhaps think that someone who accomplished a lot at a young age would be naturally arrogant; after all, it's true that i have never really experienced quantitative failure. but the thing that saves me from this brand of arrogance is the fact that i really don't think that those precocious accomplishments mean anything.
to me, it truly is irrelevant that i went to harvard at age 16 and got my ph. d. at 22. those aren't important things in life; those have no correlation to the important things, which are relationships and friendships and making people around you happy and being happy yourself. maybe i have this viewpoint because i've taken the academic stuff for granted; i don't know. but there's a very real sense that i don't view these accomplishments as at all relevant.
the other thing that i think frequently leads to my being perceived as arrogant is the fact that i think i can do anything. i have this very strong sense that nothing is impossible, and that if i put my mind to it there's really nothing i can't do. tied in with this is my notion of invincibility; i really don't think i'm going to die. not that i do all sorts of dangerous things, but the self-confidence in that sense is definitely there.
the thing is, and i bet i have written this before here: i truly believe that everyone can do everything. all that it requires is focus and concentration and clear thinking and most importantly putting your entire mind and body and effort into it. i don't mean that in a hippie sort of way; i mean that in the sense that most people do things half-heartedly, and fail, and then rail against failing. in this professional sense (again, as opposed to the things that really matter), i have only two professional strengths: i'm very fast, and when i concentrate on things, i really concentrate on them. i'm actually really bad at doing things half-heartedly; for instance, if bridge doesn't have my full concentration for whatever reason, i'm awful at it.
it's not really that i'm good at this monomaniacal concentration. but i have my spells of it, which have a lot to do with the general clamor level of my life and how well i've been sleeping. and these moments allow me, would allow anyone, to do exceptional things. i really think that if anything is different about me, it's not intelligence so much as these moments of incredible focus and intensity, both professionally and personally.
the funny thing is that this intensity -- i'm not going to go into this in detail because it's not really on topic -- is a contributing factor to the demise of my relationships. i have a theory about relationships. there are two modes: attack mode and defense mode. attack mode is when you meet someone; you need to stand out, you need to be sparkly, you need to pique their interest. i'm empirically very good at this; i don't think anyone would accuse me of not making a strong impression, excepting group situations where i know one or two people and they all know each other, where everyone is pretty much paralyzed. it may not be a good impression, but it's catchy.
defense mode is what i'm bad at. defense mode is when you have this wonderful relationship, and you just need to not screw up, you just need to have things develop naturally. and here the intensity is really a negative; it's taxing and melodramatic and just too intense for defense mode, which requires the day-to-day relaxing stability that comes from being laid-back and patient. but anyway, i promised not to go into this in detail, and i won't.
so back to the arrogance. i think that these two reasons why people perceive me as arrogant are sort of invalid, for reasons above. there are other reasons. these days i tend to talk a lot in groups, and often loudly and (there it is again) intensely. i honestly am not trying to make myself the center of attention (well except when i am trying to meet someone in particular); first of all, that's just the way i am (i say most of what's on my mind), and second of all, i think it improves other people's quality of life. if my role is to be the ridiculous clown with absurd crackpot theories, and have people laugh at me and share moments by rolling their eyes at each other about me, that's okay with me.
the clown, the person you bond over the absurdity of, is actually a fairly common role in life. i can think of several people in various friend groups over the years who filled the role of the clown. freshman year there was someone who was trying to infiltrate our friend group, who none of us really liked, but i think his existence brought us closer in our quest to avoid him or make fun of him. i'm not saying this was a moral thing for us to do, but i think it's a common phenomenon. a while ago, when i had melodramatically decided i would never be personally happy again, i took it as my mission to be the clown, so that i could at least make other people happy in some way. (to be sure, the optimal clown does more than be laughed at; there are many different subspecies of this archetype.)
but anyway, i guess in these group settings where i'm a loudmouth arrogant, i see my job as sort of avoiding boredom. mafia is probably the best example of this; with no loud people, mafia tends to stagnate, as a bunch of more passive personalities sit around waiting for something to happen. it's just not as fun. i'm certainly not saying that you shouldn't kill me off in mafia; i admit that in addition to making things fun, i also make things more annoying, and just like in real life, sometimes you really wish i would just shut up. but i fill a role there.
i also think that one of the reasons loudmouths are viewed as arrogant is that they must think they're better/more interesting than eveyone else, and that's why they deserve to be talking. the funny thing is that i don't fundamentally consider myself a talker. i would much rather listen to other people talk than myself; i already know what i'm going to say, after all. obviously in conversations you need both skills, but in general, with a friend, i would much rather hear them talk than talk myself. i don't think that invalidates the arrogance parsing entirely; after all, i do talk a lot because on a very basic level i think i have thoughts that are worth expressing. but it's not as true as you might think.
so that reason is sort of good. but the best evidence for my arrogance is i think very deep in my unconscious. it's simple: i don't grant people a whole lot of agency. i've known this for some time, and it's really bothered me, because it is inherently incredibly arrogant. probably the best example of this is in relationships. when i break up with someone, i generally always think that it's because we aren't right for each other. when someone breaks up with me, i generally always think that it's because i've done something wrong. the flip-side explanations for breakups just don't sound right for me; i never think of someone as just having made a mistake which led to a breakup (even though in one case this is certainly a very strong objective hypothesis.) and when someone breaks up with me, i never think that it's because we aren't right for each other; i always think that it's just because of some mistake i made that wasn't intrinsic to me.
this is actually incredibly arrogant, in addition to being disrespectful. since i treat relationships with such reverence and importance (certainly too much of both, or at least the latter), and i fall so deeply in love with people (which absolutely does not invalidate any particular instance), you would think that someone i think of as my soulmate would obtain some level of agency. but this doesn't really happen, although it happens enough that i can see a differential in how much agency i ascribe to various people.
basically i think i am in control of my life. when i choose to break up with someone, i am making a choice, which i always believe is based on how i am inherently and how they are inherently. meanwhile, when someone breaks up with me, i always believe that this was triggered by some event, something i did wrong. related to this -- this is pretty personal for a public forum, but i guess i will continue -- is the fact that to some extent i have trouble believing that someone could fundamentally be better than me for someone i'm in love with (which is contemporarily true when they break up with me), and because of this i assume that the flaw in the relationship is that i haven't done a good enough job of being the loving caring me, that i've screwed up. i never believe that i will screw up in the future; i never believe that constantly screwing up is really a terminal part of my personality. and so i always view these past screw-ups or suboptimalities not as evidence that we're not right for each other, but as sporadic events which don't reflect the likely future. and i bemoan my mistakes and how i screwed up the relationship by them, because i don't really consider them part of who i am.
and that is actually incredibly arrogant. i know that all this is going on at a conscious and unconscious level, and i know that it's not a good attitude. i guess this is representative of my current mental state: i have a great deal of self-awareness right now about my life and my foibles and me in general, but i'm not really sure how to translate that into self-improvement. it's all a work in progress.