Core exercise · 1 of 12
Ego
Yes / no, once a day
"One side of the coin: The centre of the universe"
As Epicurus put it, "Where I am, death is not; where death is, I am not." I am the centre of this universe I perceive with my senses; if I'm not here, there is no universe either. So, technically speaking, the most important person in this universe is me. I have no choice, and no purpose, other than to look after myself, physically and mentally. When a feeling of being cornered or helpless takes hold of me, when I catch myself clenching my jaw or fiddling with my beard, I know I've started to come off the rails. Whoever or whatever is in front of me, I've picked it up and put it in the centre; it has started to matter more than my inner peace and my health. I know, everybody uses the word ego to mean arrogant these days, but ego means one thing and one thing only: I. Anyone who oversteps the mark, emotionally or physically, and starts crossing the borders of the "ego", of the "I", is bound to get told where to get off. Rather than keeping quiet, swallowing it and giving yourself throat cancer, take whatever you were going to say and throw it in their face; let them deal with it, let them go and splash some water on their face and pull themselves together. It is only in the last few years, after 35, that I managed to do this, and with a psychologist's help the practice picked up speed; once my relationships gained a much healthier kind of communication, I found myself in a bittersweet but contented regret, along the lines of "If only I had said what I actually felt from the very beginning. My ego deserved that much." Mind you, half my friends weren't happy about it and left; that's a separate matter. The ones who stayed are keepers!
"The other side of the coin: Stardust"
Building a healthy ego is essential; that much is beyond dispute. On the other hand, when I think about it, who am I to swagger about in front of you like this, going "I do this and it feels tremendous; I practise that and it works wonders!"? I am a single speck of stardust among trillions. I matter to you, I matter to the next person, but to someone else I'm nothing at all. What matters is this: when I touch the ego I've built inside me, does what I feel have the structure of wafer-thin glass, ready to shatter, or is it as clear as a diamond and just as solid? If someone came up to you, shouted "You're the most purple person in the world!" and walked off, what would you feel? Hmm? Nothing, right? Is "being purple" a personal matter of life and death for you? No! It isn't for anyone, because it's nonsense of the highest order! Then, looking along the same axis, what meaning does any remark some other ego makes about your ego have? If you're sure you're "not purple", remarks like that have neither power nor meaning left in them, do they? That's all life is: egos and events like these bumping into each other like dodgems, and you, the person in the car, either laughing at it or getting angry! The one thing that never changes, whatever the outcome and whatever the process, however seriously or lightly you take it, is that this life is one thing and one thing only: a funfair full of ups and downs and shiny toys. That line may have cracked your shield of seriousness; sorry. But once you and I are six feet under, somebody somewhere will reheat last night's pizza on some dull Wednesday evening, carry on liking cat videos on social media, and wake up swearing the next morning and go to work. And we, you and I, will never again see this beautiful life that person couldn't care less about.
Research
Research: Ego
What the research says about a healthy "I", stepping back from yourself, and feeling small.
These notes are a starting point for the author's own reading; nothing here is medical advice.
The exercise has two halves, and both have been studied. The first half, a healthy ego that says what it feels, matches two lines of work: self-affirmation research, which finds that reminding yourself of what you value makes threats to the self easier to take (Cohen and Sherman 2014), and emotion-regulation research, which finds that habitually suppressing what you feel goes with worse mood and poorer relationships than expressing or reappraising it (Gross and John 2003). The second half, the stardust view, matches "self-distancing": looking at a painful situation from a step back, as an observer would, helps people make sense of it without being swamped by it (Kross and Ayduk 2011). The feeling of being tiny in front of something vast, which researchers call the "small self", has been studied under the heading of awe; it shifts attention away from one's own concerns and towards other people (Piff and colleagues 2015). The Epicurus line comes from his Letter to Menoeceus.
The funfair, the dodgems and "nobody cares" are the author's own framing. No study is cited for them, and none should be invented.
References
- Cohen, G. L., and Sherman, D. K. (2014). The psychology of change: Self-affirmation and social psychological intervention. Annual Review of Psychology.
- Gross, J. J., and John, O. P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
- Kross, E., and Ayduk, O. (2011). Making meaning out of negative experiences by self-distancing. Current Directions in Psychological Science.
- Piff, P. K., Dietze, P., Feinberg, M., Stancato, D. M., and Keltner, D. (2015). Awe, the small self, and prosocial behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
- Epicurus. Letter to Menoeceus (third century BCE), preserved in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book X.
Notes last touched October 16, 2026