The Problem with the Ego – I guess it was inevitable with so many egos running around. I was recently white, male, and age-shamed because I was in the way of someone of a different gender, race, and age. I was waiting to board a flight to premiere my new movie, BeyondPhysicalMatter.com, and I guess I wasn’t moving fast enough for the back of the plane. It wasn’t enough to get out of her way; she had to pronounce to the assembly that she had been dealing with white, old men all her life. It gave me pause to reflect on egos in general and the problem with them today.
Sigmund Freud conceived of the “id” [das Es], the “ego” [das “ich”], and the “superego” [das Uber-Ich] in 1920 in his essay “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” Freud argued that the “ego” was the mind’s ability and process of dealing with what he called “the reality principle” as opposed to the “pleasure principle”. Simply stated, the ego is the mind’s process of dealing with the harsh realities of life (adult delayed gratification) versus seeking pleasure (immature gratification).
For years the ego got a lot of bad press and has been defined as “the desire to enjoy life at the expense of others.” Some writers claim that the ego is an unhealthy belief in our own self-importance, embellished with arrogance and self-centered ambition. Some claim that the ego makes you over-estimate your own abilities and worth, and under-estimate the effort and skill required to achieve your goals. It creates a need for external validation and praise.
I would argue that this is an unhealthy ego, as a healthy ego is necessary and intimately involved in our sense of self. A healthy ego involves self-awareness, and a recognition that we can improve. It is the ability to accurately assess who we are and what we can do. It gets us out of bed in the morning and get up in front of audiences to share ourselves and our message for the world. Without an ego, this would be impossible.
We need to focus on developing a healthy ego. Our society seems to promote unhealthy egos, satisfying our need to feel important by shaming others. America was built on egos, but the aspects of our society that we criticize often is the result of unhealthy egos.
The symptoms of an unhealthy ego are:
- Inability to accept criticism
- Feeling you know everything
- Refusal to consider other people’s opinions
- Inability to accept responsibility
- Life happens to you
- Blaming others for disappointments
- Feeling people are jealous of you
- Feeling the world is against you
- Inability to forgive
- Feelings of entitlement
- Claiming other’s suffering as your own
- Fundamental need to be right
- Feeling superior to others
- Thinking you are the smartest person in the room
- Resenting other people’s success
- Constant need for validation
- Habitual interruption
- Constant need for more
- Inability to forgive
- Tendency to play God
- Poor listening skills
- General lack of empathy
- Self-centered and selfish
It is important to differentiate between healthy confidence, resilience and self-awareness and unhealthy arrogance, selfishness, and victimhood. The brain is basically social in nature and motivated by social contact. We grow as human beings by evolving from needy infants to self-sustaining adults. The focus goes from the exterior world to the internal world. While infants are focused on what is happening in the outer world, a healthy individualized adult is focused on what is happening between their ears.When we are born, we do not have an ego. We are a clean slate. We look up at the world with total innocence and begin to learn the difference between fear/pain and pleasure. Then we begin to form conclusions based on experiences and education how to behave. The experience of trauma can greatly distort our perception of our environment and color our experience of life. We form cognitive biases, that cause us to shame others and belittle people we do not know. This limits our experience of the world and our ability to transform adversity to success.
The ego has rules and questions. When we challenge anything, it is our ego leading the charge. When we dismiss someone because of how they look, or because they are in our way, we miss the opportunity to meet them on common ground and find out how they can help us. I cannot count the number of friends I have made because I did not dismiss them because of a stereotype or bias.
A healthy ego would ask, “Why is this person in my path?” rather than, “Why is this person in my way?”. To take a moment and ask a stranger what they can offer instead of dismissing them can be a source of wealth and growth far beyond human imagination. I learned from one of my gurus that it is more important to sit and talk with a beggar than to give them money. You will never know when you will find a teacher in a beggar’s robes.
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