Ego
I opened up my Instagram this morning and saw a reel suggesting that the best way to get followers is to stop telling stories and start "yapping." The instructions were to hold a camera to your face and "yap" about yourself, your life, as if the person watching was in the room with you, just observing what's happening in your head. The instructions were clear — make sure your yapping is curated, though. Don't just yap. Pretend like you're yapping, but make sure there's a point that drives people to your page.
To be honest, my first response was: oh, I better start yapping more. I'm not doing enough yapping. What will I yap about? A yap a day will clearly get me where I need to go.
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We live in a world that is an evolutionary mismatch for our "selfing." Humans evolved egos as protectors — probably around the time of the agricultural revolution, when we moved from hunting and gathering to farming and needed to start planning ahead, thinking about ourselves, worrying, ruminating.
In his book The Curse of the Self, Mark Leary describes the ego as a mental apparatus for thinking consciously about ourselves — and argues that it evolved the way other adaptations evolved (think opposable thumbs), to help us survive. Some evolutionary psychologists argue that this voice in our head — the one that comments, advises, thinks about us — evolved to help us:
Imagine consequences
Compete for resources
Mentally time travel
Plan ahead
Make deliberate decisions
Compare alternatives
Understand others' minds
Create cultures
But there's an evolutionary mismatch — not unlike our fondness for sugar and fat making so many of us sick in environments now saturated with fat and salt. All this internal and external yapping is making us unwell. Well, at least it's making me unwell, to be egotistical about it.
We think about ourselves and the outcomes we strive for way too much. As a result, we feel alone in our heads, not good enough, like we'll "never get there." As a high-performing client told me yesterday — a person who is at the very top of her game — "I keep thinking I should be doing more."
The key words there are I and doing. Those are clues your ego is at work.
The origin of the word ego is simply the Latin word for "I." It wasn't until Freud that ego became popularized as a psychological term — he believed it was the mediator between the id (your impulses) and the superego (your shoulds).
But these days, when I think about ego, I think of the part of us that chases after being right, being seen, being blown up like a helium balloon so you can rise higher than others — only to deflate and fall pathetically to the living room floor. Your ego is the part of you that comments all day long about yourself. It's self-referential, self-focused, and loves a good selfie.
Stop, just a moment. Is it commenting now? I bet it is. Mine is too.
This little "you" in your head — and research on how people intuitively locate their sense of self suggests most of us place it somewhere behind the eyes, in the head — left unchecked, can run all sorts of havoc.
The Ego Distorts Our Perception of Reality
When college students were asked to rate themselves against their peers on a long list of qualities, the overwhelming pattern was the same: people rate themselves better than average on almost everything. One of the classic versions of this research, Alicke's 1985 study using 40 trait adjectives, found people consistently see themselves as more honest, more capable, more everything-good than the average person — a bias so reliable psychologists just call it the "better-than-average effect." (A related, very famous version of this: a 1981 study found roughly 90% of drivers rated themselves as safer and more skilled than the median driver. We cannot all be above median. That's not how medians work.)
And the flip side is just as compelling: research on kids praised for being smart rather than for their effort (Dweck's studies on praise and motivation) found those kids gave up faster on hard problems than kids praised for working hard. When your identity is "I'm the smart one," a hard problem is a threat to that identity — so ego protects itself by quitting early rather than risking proof that it might be wrong.
The Ego Rises and Falls Like a Roller Coaster
When I interviewed Ron Siegel about his book The Extraordinary Act of Being Ordinary, he talked about how what goes up must come down. One minute we feel great about ourselves, like we're better than others; the next we feel like losers, walking embarrassments. This is what drives our striving — in hopes that one day, our ego will make it, and stay there.
And, so, we keep doing more and not feeling like we are doing enough. We fill our lips with filler, we fill our houses with plastic crap, and we fill our calendars with tasks that don’t really bring us joy but we think will get us “ahead” at some point.
The Ego Keeps You Separate
The concept of emptiness in Buddhism is similar to the concept of self-as-process in ACT — the ego believes that little voice in your head is you, negating the you that is in relationship, the you that is in nature, the you that is connected to your ancestors. And when you're stuck in your head, you miss out on this feeling of bigger interconnection — what Dan Siegel calls the "MWe," the me that is also we. And as a result we feel lonely, even in a crowd, and feel like it is all up to us to figure things out.
So what can we do about this little ego that follows us around everywhere? Here are a few tips from psychology and contemplative practice.
Call It by Its True Name
In my favorite poem by Thich Nhat Hanh, "Please Call Me by My True Names," he asks us to recognize ourselves in all of it — both the pirate and the twelve-year-old refugee girl he assaulted, both the frog and the grass-snake that silently approaches and devours the frog. You can call your ego by its true name by noticing it as only one part of you — a frog today, maybe a pirate tomorrow — but the true you is much bigger, more interconnected. Get out of your head for a minute and into this moment. Who are you, really? The voice that is telling you scary stories? The voice that tells you, you are better than them? Or something else?
Ask Yourself: Why Are You Running?
When I interviewed Jo Confino the c0-author of Being with Business and co-host of the podcast The Way Out Is In he asked this simple question: notice when you're striving, and ask yourself why. Why are you running? What is driving your drive for more, for different? Is it your ego? Or is it something deeper?
Stop Yapping and Start Listening
The ego dissolves when we meld with others. Yap about yourself — in your head and out loud — a little less. Put down the selfie and the self-help book. Stop referencing everything back to you, and start putting your two eyes out into the world instead. What else do you see? What are you curious about? What's happening around you?
You Have More Than Enough Conditions to Be Happy
When the ego future-trips on you, remember this simple gatha from Thich Nhat Hanh. Right now — what are those conditions? That will snap you out of it. :)