Anita Chaudhuri’s friend only asked how she was as they were leaving. He had spent ninety minutes at the table on his marathon-training food plan — pausing once to negotiate “four egg whites, two yolks, is that possible?” at a greasy spoon — and the question came at the coat-rack, on the way out. She walked home irritated, and then wondering whether their relationship, which mostly runs on voice notes rather than meetings, had trained him into it.
The phenomenon has a name four decades old: conversational narcissism, coined by the sociologist Charles Derber in The Pursuit of Attention (1979). What interests the therapists and coaches quoted in the piece is why the name feels more current than ever. Charlotte Fox Weber’s answer is that the medium has changed — “WhatsApp communication and voice notes are really a series of monologues,” she says, and in person “people are forgetting how to pause naturally, to make space to hear and listen.” Phone calls, which at least enforce turn-taking, have become rare. The life coach Tamu Thomas puts the failure slightly differently: online communication is mostly transactional or siloed into topic groups, which erodes the unserious, meandering conversation where two people find out things about each other. “Because there are now so many different channels available to stay in touch,” she says, “some people are confusing communication with connection.”
The monologuist and the trauma dumper
The serial monologuist is not just long-winded; Fox Weber notes they tend to pick subjects that mean nothing to anyone else. Recounting the granular detail of a lost suitcase or a leaking dishwasher may be cathartic for the teller and worthless to the room. The dialogue coach Sarah Rozenthuler’s counterintuitive advice is to time-box them — full attention for five minutes, ten if you can stand it, and no expectation of your own turn. Being fully heard tends to settle people, she argues. Then redirect rather than shut down: “Well, that’s really interesting, and it reminds me of…” The point is not just to reclaim airtime but to stop performing the role of the seething bystander.
The trauma dumper is the same shape with a different payload: oversharing with no boundary and no read on the room. Thomas’s suggested move is to work out what you actually want from the relationship before confronting anything — and then ask for it plainly. Her own version was to tell a friend she wanted to hear about the good days too, not only the crises. “It was scary,” she says, “but saying, ‘I really want to be part of your joy as well as your struggle,’ was a lot more productive than angrily accusing her of dumping all her problems at my door.”
Boomerasking, which has actual research behind it
The piece’s most evidence-backed figure is the boomerasker: someone who asks a question so they can talk next. Michael Yeomans, an associate professor of behavioural science at Imperial College, has studied it and sorts it into three variants. The ask-brag (“I went to France for the weekend”) and the ask-complaint — where a question about your commute becomes a detailed account of how packed the tube was, the accident, the coffee on the shoe — are straightforwardly self-serving. The ask-share is subtler: a request for your opinion from someone who is not listening to it, only waiting for a gap. In all three, Yeomans says, “the perceived sincerity of the question hooks people in.”
His research suggests the motive is not usually malice. Boomeraskers think they are being helpful and inclusive, and their interest in telling you something is genuine even when their interest in you is superficial. The practical fix is the mirror question: answer vaguely, then ask with real enthusiasm about their journey, which denies them the material they wanted and — the useful part — makes it impossible for them to cut you off. If it still doesn’t work, Yeomans suggests boomerasking them back to see what happens.
Interrupters, and the ones on the moral high ground
Interrupters are easy to identify and hard to confront. In one case in the piece, a woman made redundant at 55 sought coffee and moral support from a former colleague and got advice instead — retraining suggestions, tips on outwitting applicant tracking systems — delivered over the top of everything she tried to say. Fox Weber is careful not to treat the trait as pure aggression; it can come from “a kind of skittishness, a desire for the conversation not to go meandering off-piste.” But the effect is to impose one person’s will on what ought to be collaborative. Her advice splits by setting: in a group, advocate for the person being talked over — “Wait, she’s telling a story. Let her finish it” — and one-on-one, insist on your own turn and resume your story even if you have lost the thread.
The last type, the care bear, opens with “How are you, really?” and pivots to a mini-Ted-Talk on AI datacentres, sewage or world hunger. It is maddening partly because they occupy the moral high ground. Rozenthuler’s suggestion is to acknowledge genuinely — “I can understand your concern about XYZ, and I, too, really hope there’s going to be some change” — and then change the subject, because this person “is often stuck in a groove and it’s going to take a lot more than you or I have capacity for to help them get out of it.”
Two caveats worth keeping. The people in the piece are anonymised and self-reporting, and nothing here measures how common any of these types is. And while the article’s framing implies the problem is worsening, Derber’s baseline is 1979 — before voicemail, group chat or the voice note that may or may not have produced Chaudhuri’s omelette monologue.