Ego vs Identity
In one of the conversations I had inside the confession booth on the Playa, the subject of Ego vs Identity came up. I’m presenting an engineer’s outlook on how these two concepts work together.
Your Identity is a database of traits that define you. You can think of these traits as membership cards to human communities. Membership is obtained via your likes/dislikes or your context.
For eg. if you really love Apple, you gain membership to the Apple fanboy community. If you truly dislike Trump, you gain membership to the anti-Trump community. If you are a brown immigrant in America, you gain membership to that community.
When an event happens, the Ego processing unit in your brain does a look-up on the Identity database and tries to answer the question “Do I like/dislike this event?”.
For eg. Event ‘iPhone launch got delayed’ will return a ‘dislike’ from an Identity which includes the trait ‘Apply fanboy’. Event ‘Hasan Minhaj released a Netflix special’ may return a ‘like’ from an Identity which includes the trait ‘brown American immigrant’. Event ‘Trump got elected’ will return a ‘dislike’ from an Identity which includes the trait ‘anti-Trumper’.
If the answer is a ‘like’, then your Ego generates a Craving for more of the event. This Craving becomes a source of Misery when the event ends as it does because everything is impermanent.
If the answer is a ‘dislike’, then your Ego generates an Aversion. This Aversion becomes a source of Misery while the event persists.
We live in a society where Identities are susceptible to fattening. There are many systemic forces acting in their own self-interests to fatten individual Identities.
For eg. Apple benefits monetarily from having more Apple fanboys. Nations benefit from inculcating national Identities in their citizens because such citizens are less likely to protest (eg. exhortations of the kind “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”). The brown immigrant community can benefit by having more members in it. Some of these systemic benefits may be aligned with your individual interests. Some might not be. The key point here is in being conscious about what is a part of your Identity and how it got in there in the first place. Paul Graham’s goes into this in detail.
So one way of reducing misery is being conscious about the size of your Identity database. You can reverse engineer this mechanism to enable an Identity reduction. Keep track of occasions of extreme happiness and extreme sorrow. These occasions will typically point out to some trait in your Identity database. Ask yourself how this community membership got into your Identity database in the first place and what value it adds to your life. Note here that it’s important to track both happiness and sorrow for faster Identity reduction. This is because both emotions can point to the same Identity trait. The Egotic trap is to maintain your community membership via positive emotions and then slam you with the negative ones. Any attempt at just ‘fixing’ the negatives will be futile.
Cravings generate from Likes out of a desire for permanence and Aversions generate from Dislikes out of a concern about their permanence.
A desire for permanence is foolish because everything is impermanent. Literally everything. However, just logically accepting this isn’t enough because once the Craving/Aversion has been generated, it’s already led to Misery and you’re now fighting an uphill battle. This has to be accepted subconsciously. Subconscious acceptance of Impermanence of everything throws a spanner into Egotic machinery and is the permanent way to fix Misery.
Misery is bad and should be fixed. Misery makes you less efficient in action. Misery wastes time.
The *physical* exercise for doing this is what the Buddha discovered and was his main innovation and contribution to human society. It’s called Vipassana and I’ve pitched it before here.
