Embracing My Ego
As if waking from a night’s slumber, my youth passes like the hours gone by. I reach for memories, but they slip away like hazy smoke that cannot be grasped by the hand. With each day that I grow older, that which is inevitable looms uncomfortably closer.
The body which seemed emaciated in high school now struggles to keep weight off. Friendships which seemed would last forever fade without much struggle. And each year, my parents will ask that dreaded question: “When will you get married?”
It is, as they say, a rite of passage. Each season in life contains milestones for normal people to achieve, like owning a house or raising children. I understand their concern — it sometimes does pain me to see those younger than me getting married, as if I had missed the boarding of a train. But in my heart, I long for more because I know there is.
Memento Mori
‘Why do we wait?’” Ivan Ivanich glanced angrily at Bourkin. “Why do we wait, I ask you? What considerations keep us fast? I am told that we cannot have everything at once, and that every idea is realised in time. But who says so? Where is the proof that it is so? You refer me to the natural order of things, to the law of cause and effect, but is there order or natural law in that I, a living, thinking creature, should stand by a ditch until it fills up, or is narrowed, when I could jump it or throw a bridge over it? Tell me, I say, why should we wait? Wait, when we have no strength to live, and yet must live and are full of the desire to live! — Anton Chekhov, “Gooseberries”
All men must die, and we often don’t get to choose how. Yet Chekhov’s story reminds us that there is as much regret that comes from a long life unfulfilled as a life cut unfairly short.
While marriage, children, and home ownership are nice things to many people, at this point in life I see them as an anchor pulling me underwater. Marriage and children are often not the ends, but a means to a purposeful life. The question of the purpose of our existence is often a daunting one when looking only at ourselves, and so we being social animals tend look to other people for meaning and driving force in life. “Be fruitful and multiply”, as scripture prescribes.
But are people really happy in their fruitfulness? At times I see family life as an insatiable beast — the more it grows, the more it must consume. Each of these milestones seem to require us to spin our wheels harder and faster in order to keep up with the increasing obligations of mortgages, tuition, etc. I see my parents and their friends working hard and denying themselves their whole lives just to sustain their families, waiting for their rest at retirement. As Ivan Ivanich lamented, we often wait to live life until we’ve lost the ability to really savor it.
Is it so wrong for me to conclude, then, that these milestones are not the key to a life well-lived?
The Value of Ego
Others may argue that I take my selfishness too far — that I’m wrapped up in my own ego and ignoring our nature as societal animals. That word ‘ego’ seems to always be used with negative connotation, though the concept is essentially neutral. Sigmund Freud described the ‘ego’ as the sense of self which rules over the ‘id’, our primal impulses. The ‘superego’ is the internalization of cultural ideals which then shapes decisions made by our ego.
Without my ‘ego’, I would not be a ‘person’. Like a robot with only programmed objectives or an animal driven by the reptilian brain, a human with no ego would be ruled only by the compulsions of the id and the regulations of the superego. I sense that much of the spiritual crisis befalling our generation is due to a lack of ego rather than an overabundance. We are so ruled by external forces of superego that we rebel via indulging the id, as if the physical pleasures of eating, traveling, or sex could give birth to our ego.
Although others worry that I risk not living a complete life by not dating and marrying, I would argue the contrary — I cannot become wholly myself if I do not first find my sense of self. Without ego, we are no more than pack animals living out our biological imperatives.
Note that self-branding is not the same as self-actualization. Self branding is the materialization of our ego problem, in which we believe that our relationships and what people think of us create our identity. In the Instagram era, the online masses define virtue by the season.
We have more faith in what we imitate than in what we originate. We cannot derive a sense of absolute certitude from anything that has its roots in us. The most poignant sense of insecurity comes from standing alone; we are not alone when we imitate. It is thus with most of us! We are what other people say we are. We know ourselves chiefly by hearsay.
There is a powerful craving in most of us to see ourselves as instruments in the hands of others and thus free ourselves from the responsibility for acts that are prompted by our own questionable inclinations and impulses. Both the strong and the weak grasp at the alibi. The latter hide their malevolence under the virtue of obedience; they acted dishonorably because they had to obey orders. The strong, too, claim absolution by proclaiming themselves the chosen instrument of a higher power — God, history, fate, nation, or humanity.
— Bruce Lee
Family, career, and religion give us the excuse of responsibility to others to avoid responsibility to oneself.
Our Legacy
“We are not so much afraid of dying but that we won’t be remembered when we’re gone. The struggle was not to survive, but to let the world know we were here.” — Shiori Kitano, Battle Royale
Traditionally, men viewed their offspring as extensions of themselves and children derived their status from their fathers. The passing of genes is our way of leaving our mark on the world; as long as our bloodline continues, we live on though dead. But just as our selves do not only consist of our id, we have much more to pass on than the genes of our physical body. Our ego transmitted through word, art, and actions are our spiritual offspring which crystallize over time into the collective superego.
“The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.” — T.H. Huxley
Long before we amused ourselves with funny cat pictures, Richard Dawkins created the notion of a ‘meme’ as a unit cultural transmission much like a gene. Just as members of an ecology exert their will for survival, our thoughts have the desire to see the light of day, to be accepted and be spread. Not much of Socrates or Shakespeare exists in today’s gene pool, yet their mark on culture lives on robustly. If our subconscious desire is to reproduce ourselves, then it is our memes rather than our genes that allow us to live on after the grave.
In the face of death, what I fear most is not having found someone to love but to have never found myself. A path of solitude is not necessarily a dark one.
