Conquering the Ego

The ego (literal Latin translation: “I”) is a concept that is used to describe our inner voice—sometimes it’s our conscience and sometimes it’s the little devil on our shoulder. A generally accepted depiction of the ego is that it is a negative influence on our lives and something that needs to be controlled and overcome.

The negative connotations we ascribe to the ego are in fact the by-products of a function humans evolved to survive and respond quickly to dangerous situations: our ability to compare one thing to another. As hunter-gatherers we needed to compare things quickly and make snap judgements about potential predators and prey, alike. This ego function served us well as we ascended to the top of the food chain.

However, as societies continued to evolve and become more complex, this same ego function did not. The pace of biological evolution, after all, is much slower than economic and societal progress. Our caveman brains went from dealing with relatively little information on the plains and in the forests, to a daily tidal wave of information in the form of news, social media, personal interactions, etc. It’s been estimated that a person’s daily consumption of information today is equivalent to what a person living 100 years ago would have consumed in an entire year.

There is a lot going on. Sometimes this results in information overload. After all, our minds have finite resources. Whatever information comes through must be processed, evaluated, and a decision needs to be made. When we cannot come to a conclusion – maybe because we need more information – that case goes in our comparison backlog, taking up more of our mental resources and potentially weighing on our well-being.

There are also times where we choose not to use our mental resources altogether; we stay wilfully blind to the comparisons we should be making, in favor of others that make us feel better. We choose, for example, not to compare our skill set and long-term career prospects relative to a colleague’s, instead choosing to focus on their recent promotion. By comparing the wrong thing, we can develop negative emotions (i.e. jealousy) and this moves us closer to conflict.

Considering these limitations, we should be mindful how we allocate our energy and our personal resources. There are cases where spending energy to compare things results in positive outcomes, and there are cases where that energy is wasted. When we waste it, we end up with the negative effects people so often blame on the ego: anxiety, overconfidence, jealousy.

How then, does one more efficiently control their mental resources? The first thing to do is to make a concerted effort to compare fewer things. Not everything we encounter requires an opinion or a judgement (good or bad?). Saving those comparisons for what matters frees up our mental resources and generally contributes to a better frame of mind.

Choosing what is worthy of comparison and what is not can be tricky. Generally, you should compare yourself sparingly to others – each person’s life experience is unique and comparing yourself to someone else is like comparing an apple to an orange. Instead, compare yourself to yourself: how am I doing relative to myself a year ago? 5 years ago? What can I do to improve myself a year from now? 5 years? Comparing against yourself is the only accurate comparison you can make because it’s the only accurate information you have available. In this way, you focus on outcomes you can control, as opposed to expending energy on outcomes you cannot control.

One thing to avoid when trying to overcome the ego, is attempting to overcome the ego. It all gets rather circular. To overcome anything, you must first understand what it is you are overcoming. You do this by analyzing the subject and comparing yourself to it, trying to identify its weaknesses. Sound familiar?

Specifically, the ego works by comparing two things: creating the concept of “I” (i.e. you) and the concept of an “other”. In this case, we are comparing the “I” and the “ego”. And therein lies the problem. You are relying on the ego to do this for you—the comparing of one thing to another—a function you are trying to do without. By blaming or fighting the ego, you only allocate more resources and energy to it. A counter-productive exercise.

Ego control comes much easier if you can be honest with yourself. We all have an ego. No one is perfect. But the mistakes we make are not because of our ego, they are because of us. And we should accept this and find ways to forgive ourselves so we can learn the lessons that need learning, and move forward as better, stronger people.