Become aware of your ego

I read a great caption this week: “pack your ego, but leave it in the trunk.”

Although the phrase could be open to interpretation, it got me thinking about ego in general. You’ll often find me sharing about how we must put our ego to death, pride only stands in the way of complete illumination. This is partly due to some personal feelings, but mostly due to self-revelations achieved by immersing myself in good quality content. I know, big complicated sentence, but bear with me. Now, the question is: can we completely obliterate the ego? Perhaps, but honestly, I don’t know. I do think that for certain periods in our life we can put it to death and remain the humble toiler in search of a cause greater than ourselves. But as is human-nature, we almost inevitably fall into the trap of self-glorification, and it often takes a huge humbling event to have us put our ego to the side again.

How do we break this cycle of self-glorification?

Personally, this is not even my opinion, just a platform where I can share thoughts, the only answer I can come up with is awareness. It is essential to become aware of your ego, once you realize that ego will always look for a foothold in your life, it becomes easier to control. It can be argued in everything we do, there is a form of ego hidden in there somewhere. This might be true, but at least if we become aware of whether our actions originate from a place of self-discovery or self-glorification, we can train ourselves to lean more towards self-discovery.

Take social media as an example: whenever we share something, there is always some egotistical satisfaction in the amount of reactions we get. It is impossible to talk about ego and not mention ‘the selfie’. In light of the above mentioned action, I did some casual research on the subject.

According to the Department of Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich Germany:

Though exact data about the worldwide pervasiveness of selfies are not available, the estimations in existing selfie statistics are impressive. For example, the Google statistics in 2014 (Brandt, 2014) reported about 93 billion selfies taken per day — counting only Android phone users.

I don’t know if those statistics mean anything to you, but let’s pretend they do. Apparently almost a third of all photos taken by people aged 18–24 is a selfie.

I am not here to tell you to stop taking selfies, we are guilty of these actions in some way. But if you do feel like your ego is in the driving seat, it might be time for some self-discovery. The means will differ from person to person, but you owe it to yourself to find your means to self-discovery.

Again, these are not even opinions, just my mere thoughts.

You can share in it, relate to it, interact with it, or ignore it.