JONGSON PARK

What does the Ego look like?

Defensive. Attacking. Guarded. Wide open. Exuberant. Tiring. Grumpy. Easily irritable. Annoyed. Empty. Fake. Easily angered. Angry. Jealous. Insecure. Unstable. Blaming. Excuses. Justifications. Greedy. Unhealthily competitive. Dysfunctional. Irrational. Rational. Cold emotionless. Emotional. Calculating. Unthinking. Directionless. Ambitious. Unmotivated. Can’t say “no”. Can’t say “yes”. Decisive. Indecisive. Can’t be alone. Always alone.

Fear looks like many things.

A child’s greatest fear, disappointing their parent, the fear of Judgment, Rejection and Separation. This fear gives rise to their Ego, they do whatever it takes to stay in their parent’s eye of pride and joy.

What they think, say and do, the decisions they make, the school they go to, the jobs they take, the spouse they marry, what they say, how they do things become habits, become patterns, becomes who they are. If all these actions can be traced back to a fear of Judgment, Rejection, Separation then they are actions of the Ego.

Many might say, overcoming our social fears, social anxiety is a process of growing up, the fear of not fitting in, not being accepted, losing friends, losing status, being rejected, failure, being embarrassed, etc. And maybe to some degree we do with a combination of working through the fears, realizing it wasn’t as bad as we thought it would be, learning to build tolerance around it, finding ways to counter-balance high stress environments, or maybe even just living with stress and anxiety as an accepted norm. And so I think many would say, they’ve overcome their fears to some degree with some combination of those coping mechanisms.

But I think the real mechanism of dealing with our fears is the Ego we build around our fears. Or I should say, the Ego that rises out of the fear of Judgement, Rejection, Separation.

The Ego’s prime directive – Survival. The Ego’s existence and power feeds off fear – no Fear, no Ego. Hence the Ego protects, hides and defends the ‘Fear’ from others and even the Self because it is protecting its own survival and existence, through thought-patterns, decisions, justifications, rationale, relativism, emotion, subjectivity, rationale. And with every move the Ego makes, the longer it’s in control, the Fear gets more buried, hidden, unreachable making the Ego more powerful and dominant. While the Ego is associating itself more and more with the Self, and the two becoming more indistinguishably identified as the same thing.

The Ego equates itself to the actual Self, it’s a survival instinct self-defense automated program that runs itself when it detects a threat, that’s why we feel so viscerally the threat of death of the Ego as being the death of our actual physical self. This is how the Ego operates as a defense-mechanism, the sub-routine program executing the operation of self-preservation can only be effective when we perceive the death of the ego as our own physical death, otherwise we wouldn’t act with urgency.

The Ego is an antagonist, instinct, intelligence, controller. The Ego operates in the shadow, a substrate of our own consciousness, it is smarter than us because it is us but its advantage is that we don’t even know it’s there and how it’s working. To stay undetected and unnoticed, the Ego predicts our every move because it’s controlling our every move.

Our deepest, greatest fear is rooted in Judgment, Rejection, Separation. Three different conditions but roll into each other as a whole. Aside from survival instincts like food, shelter and safety, the fear of judgment, rejection, separation is most of the times what influences our thoughts, words and actions. It is our most primal social fear, fear of losing our friends, family, tribe, community, circle.

Judgment, Rejection, Separation in the form of failure, inadequacy, embarrassment, criticism, alienation, neglect, loneliness, exile, isolation. Try this, trace back any non-life threatening fear to the first principles of fear of judgment, rejection, separation. But our response to those fears is as if they are physical, life-threatening fears, when all it might result in is maybe embarrassment, failure, humility.

But that makes sense at a instinctual primal level, social animals like lions, wolves, dolphins, deer use that instinct to conform behavior and habits that is optimized for survival – moving as a group, eating certain food, reacting to sounds and movement, interaction within the pack, submitting to a hierarchy. While primal animals have refined these evolutionary instincts to perfection, we humans seem to fallibly conform to non-survival fears that often lead to disfunction and disproportionate responses. When these fears of judgment, rejection, separation are not only non-fatal but almost inconsequential, and definitely to the degree we blow them up to be in our imagination. The fears are almost illusionary.