The Artist’s Ego
If you are an artist your ego is your best friend.
I hated the ego
Growing up, I hated the ego. You can ask my summer camp roommates, Tiffany and Mel, to whom I feverishly argued my point not so many years ago. Deep into the cricket’s night call, with a layer of sticky sweat, courtesy of Ohio summers, the thought that hid from daylight made its way into the world.
I told them I felt disgusted by the feeling of superiority over others. It felt artificial. Unnatural. I thought having an ego motivated selfishness because you were only thinking inwards rather than looking outward to learn. It was a goal of mine to become more genuine. More real.
“Be more genuine,” read the aquamarine cursive letters of a New Year’s resolution.
My friend Tiffany was interested in this stoic perspective I had acquired on the ego. I told her that getting rid of the ego was keeping yourself as a humble servant to prevent the rise of arrogance. However, the humble servant doesn’t consider themselves someone with needs and wants. As I realized, this flawed thinking presents a new field of dangers that go against the natural way we are wired.
We are human centric. We perceive most things as mere reflections of our self-identity. For example, we attempt to find faces in the most inanimate objects, like cars or ceiling tiles. And if the humble servant is against developing a self-image out of fear of reaching the extreme of arrogance, then how can they ever self-actualize?
KING EGO. To be or not to be?
Many, like my younger self, adopted the stoic perspective on the ego. They portray the ego as a lavish king dressed in jewels and fine silk basking in a golden bathtub somewhere in the recesses of our minds.
Ryan Holiday, a New York Times best-selling author and well-known stoic, published a book in 2016 titled Ego is the Enemy He believes that the ego prevents us from continuing as students of life and from doing work that we think we are too highly skilled for.
To him, ego kills success because it bars us from putting in the work. The solution is confidence. Confident people are secure in their acquired skills but aren’t shy about failure or setbacks.
While this solution is very valid, I think it distorts the ego and animates it into something that alienates it from its original simplistic definition of “I.”
The word ego is Latin for “I” and was revived into the modern lexicon by Freud and his meddling into the unconscious mind. To Freud, the ego played an intermediary role between our raw desires (the id) and our elevated morals (the superego).
Do you remember the angel and devil that appeared on the shoulders of the main character whenever they had to make a decision? To Freud, the devil is the id and the angel is the superego. The main character, the one bound by the reality of the situation, is the ego.
That’s quite different from how popular culture sees the ego as no?
The metaphysical perspective on the ego aligns the most with its simple beginnings, and it’s the one I now subscribe to. In metaphysics, the ego is simply a conscious thinking subject. It is the lens through which we see the world and our place in it.
This definition makes the most sense in many respects. For one, it explains why humans are naturally human centric or egotistical. As conscious thinking objects, our goal is to understand our place in the world.
Biology is egotistical. We are studying how we work. How the blood that courses through our veins pumps into our heart. How a plethora of chemical reactions injects life-inducing chemicals into our brains. As I was never fond of biology, I labeled it as a vain subject as we were looking inwards rather than outwards.
But even when we look outwards, we are being egotistical. The people we befriend are reflections of us, and most paintings we are attracted to have a human as a subject.
Even writing is also egotistical. It’s a reflection of our perspective on the world. A shout into a void after we have taken the time to gather the whirlwind of words that blow through the walls of our minds. It’s like
HI! HEAR ME. YA, YOU! I’M TALKING.
Truly, there is nothing wrong with this. The medium of the “I” of self-awareness is simply the way humans navigate through life.
For Artists
The act of creating requires an ego. More than that, it requires an ego that is listened to. Artists need an evolving sense of identity and belief that their perspective matters in a noisy world. This doesn’t mean yelling about the work you create but rather holding an inner belief in your voice so that you can nurture it and let it grow.
Artists create because they have to. It’s not a choice to quiet down their minds and continue their daily lives before exploring that nagging sensation of humanity and existence. However, materializing the little creatures that live in the shadows of their mind into the real world is hard.
Artists grab these creatures with pincers and paint them on a canvas but can only fully express them once enough practice has gone into it. They keep going because the more these creatures are painted and written, the stronger their inner voice gets and the stronger that nagging sensation of the artist’s call to explore their views in the world gets.
Ego should be a belief in yourself to keep going and achieve an actualized introspection of our role in the world. So harness your ego because it’s the tool you have to understand your place in the world.
