Is Ego Back?

and maybe that's good tbh

Before I entered my current round of Hermit Mode to finish the first draft of this book, I spent a week in High Intensity Social Mode. It was right after the eclipse and I must have harnessed some celestial fuel, because I scheduled people back to back to back. I played B2B by Charli XCX in the mornings, flinging myself around the kitchen in the throes of what might generously be called dance while my coffee brewed. I missed my friends! I missed their stories. I missed their faces—their smiles which, (thanks to my face-blindness) I cannot conjure in my own mind, making their physical presence all the more powerful.

In that concentrated stream of interactions, I noticed one word pop up multiple times. An old word in my head, still strong and dense on the tongue. It was the ancient classic, Ego. My friends self-identified aspects of their motivations as Ego. When we discoursed about the discourse, Ego was summoned. Soon I found myself sprinkling it into my stories, because language is more fun when it is shared and thus understood. Ego!! We both nod at the word. It feels good to see the same shaft of light tilting through the trees.

When Ego dropped into the convo, my first thought was oh the 90s are back. First Olivia Rodrigo goes 90s grunge with Guts and now this? Amusing. I wrote off the repeat vocab word as little more than a coincidence. But then I listened to a couple podcasts and noticed Ego! popping up again and again.

Are we in the midst of an Ego Renaissance?

After years of running complex diagnostics on the human condition, maybe we’re returning to a simplified acceptance of what it means to be mortal. Perhaps it’s not as serious as narcissism. Maybe that cruel coworker isn’t a sociopath. And WHAT IF our self-worth is not truly defined by every single L and every successful habit?

Could it be Ego tricking us all along? I know it all lives on a spectrum—sometimes you really do need to avoid Toxic Rick from marketing—but it’s comforting to welcome Ego back into the ombre fade of self-reflection. 

I used to think about Ego fairly often. When you watch your thoughts, reactions, inner cycles, you look for a wrinkles in the infinite sense of being. You observe the Ego. It’s a voice that masquerades as Reason, but usually guides from a place of fear. Ego rustles up ghosts from the long forgotten and fills them with hot air, so they bob and sway convincingly. Ego hates change but despises when you are stagnant. Ego has never been happy for your friends, as their success translates to your failure. Ego only wants transactions with clear benefits to satisfy its endless well of insecurity.

Ego loves that we are talking about Ego, even when it is not the highest compliment. Ego feeds on attention—Ego can feel even grander when you discover it.

And discovery is inevitable. Ego is within all of us. Maybe Ego is the great unifier we’ve all been waiting for. That’s what I find kind of beautiful about it. Ego hates when we see Ego and we choose to not push against it. Ego shrinks in the face of no reaction. It shrivels in a nonchalant spotlight. Ego hates when we shrug and say, oh Ego, that’s not the infinite me.

u know this one freaked Ego out lol

In the past few years, I’ve switched out the term Ego for The Mind. It’s a slight but potent change. The Mind reflects a series of personal spiritual experiences, it has origins in teachers like Mooji who saved my life. It loosens the grip of compulsive identifying. And most of all, it allows me to step lightly within all these concepts. If I’m going to bow down to anything, it’s the flexibility of a lifelong spiritual practice. There’s no One Way to access, or even name, the Divine.

As our entry point morphs and the road winds along, perhaps finding another river, we can find new words to best suit the exploration. Nowadays I sit in silence, finding my presence and the space between. Then I take a walk and speak out loud, naming everything I am grateful for. I tell the trees how grateful I am for their shades of green. I tell the sun how grateful I am for its light. I tell the universe how grateful I am for everything I can possibly think of. Worshiping the moment in its most divine formless form. This practice would have felt extremely forced a couple years ago, but my conversation with the infinite has found this shape without any effort.

And still, words are woven deep within us. A memory will swell forward when my friend talks about Ego over midday coffees. The potency hits and I can taste the dense syrupy three letter word on my lips. Ego! I repeat, as if seeing an old colleague, yes I know her! We sip our iced beverages, fingers grasping plastic slick with condensation. We nod. Our language is singular, our language is shared. And in this moment, I want to feel the depths of it.

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