Short Rant On Weak Ego

Practically every human quality exists due to some sort of evolutionary benefit. Most of the feelings we experience have a utility in maintaining the family unit (love, jealousy) or in ensuring our survival (fear, aggression). The same logic extends to the core property of our personalities, applying to our sense of self, our id and our ego.

‘Superego’ refers to the moral umbrella at the core of our person: A set of moral standards that govern the functionality the ego, or the me part of our personality.

Ego has obvious importance to our survival. Without a sense of self we wouldn’t be the most personable bunch to be around, that’s for sure. And all of this is fine by me; no-one is ranting at anyone for simply being human. I just feel the need for an unfiltered vent, and my blog seems like a good place.

So anyway, fuck the ego. Specifically the weak one.

It is blind to itself and blaring to everything else, an acrid acne totally invisible to the host. A megaphone broadcasting ‘Accept me!’ from mental mantels with fuck-all foundation. The first-world-problem meme’d pretender preaching unfairness to an indifferent screen. The duck-faced diamante diva with a suburban portfolio. The normalisation of the exaggerated. The pervasion of the normal. The abjection of anything even remotely authentic. The facebook flag-bearing hipsters; the white knights; the social media saviours selling their disfigured shadows of a half-baked kindness. And especially the pretentious and the pedestaled, the pontificating bloggers with their self-important little rants like this one.

If the luxuries available to the working class today existed a hundred years ago, what would the public perception of them have been? Or to put it differently: If today’s working class were given the option to swap their lifestyle with the wealthy 19th century aristocracy, would they want to? The answer, of course, would be a resounding no. Most of the developed world sleeps and dresses with far superior comfort to the Kings of the past: Our beds are better, our homes are warmer, and our diets are as diverse as the world itself. And that’s not even touching on the entertainment and vehicles and modern gadgetry we have available to us. So why isn’t everyone acting with the contentment of royalty?

It happens, I think, because the nature of the ego is such that it constantly maps a sense of potential possession over everything it comes into contact with. Once something is experienced, a level of desirability is established, as is the case for a child trying chocolate for the first time. Children aren’t born crying over chocolate they aren’t eating; it’s a conditioned response to something sensory that their ego has stamped a value and potential ownership on. Before the chocolate first touched their tongue it was something that didn’t exist, afterwards it was something they did not have. It’s exactly the same for every upgrade you’ve ever gotten that you didn’t need, and why some people spend $5000 on a table when literally 5 pieces of cheap wood would serve the same practical function.

At the centre of all of this lunacy, is the ego.

I don’t hate the ego entirely—it’s the core part of being a person after all—but lately I can’t help but see it everywhere like the plague. And not just in terms of prolificness; it has the same apparentness as an illness, albeit a mostly benign one. A well-harnessed and solid ego is such a rare thing these days (or I just have a warped perception at the moment). Maybe this is just me making another in-road into reducing my own. Who knows, but I think things are a lot better for people without any need of their reflection.