Look at me! Me! Me! Me!

I am nothing special… neither are you.

Sigmund Freud once said “The ego is not master in its own house.”

Albert Einstein echoed “More the knowledge lesser the ego, lesser the knowledge more the ego.”

And Daniel Kahneman puts it succinctly when he says “We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events.”

Why have you been brought this personal selection of quotes along with such an aggressive title and what has it all to do with Ego?

Let me expand further.

The shaping of our world, in my opinion, is being done on the grandest and most public of stages, in front of our very eyes. This main feature appears on social media platforms, Netflix, Amazon prime, Disney channels, and various popular threads on the internet, along with dubious News providers that are unsurprisingly and openly biased.

There is also a shift to a rapidly advancing technology-dominated world where things are created faster than their effects can be tested and in a world where dopamine is a drug and as legal as coffee, you know that there will be lots of men and women handing out “Free Candy” and looking for innocent victims to lure into their vans.

The Ego, it seems is at the heart of this onslaught, with large corporations, media companies, consumerism and its collection of giants and even individuals lining up to sell us things that we don’t need and making sure that the things we do need, don’t last long, as expressed so clearly in the quote by Vance Packard “Manufacturers want to keep customers on a treadmill. They want to ensure that the product you buy will wear out quickly and need to be replaced.”

Nothing keeps a dopamine addict on a treadmill better than a ‘like’ or a ‘heart’ or a ‘new follower’.

My wife wrote an article recently called i-removed a world reimagined, and in it she reflects on the difficulties that she had when journalling and writing, because she struggled to remove herself from the narrative, but once she did, and with a little effort, her writing improved and her thought processes multiplied as a whole new world opened up before her.

Growing up, and during the inception and rise of the cellular phone as it was known then, no cameras existed with which to capture your selfie.

Our cellphones consisted of a dialling pad, an extendable aerial, an extremely large and heavy battery and the whole thing was the size of an icetray, and weighed around 300grams which is almost double what a smartphone weighs today.

The rise of the camera changed all of that, as the modifications that enabled this feature doubled in distance, mega pixel, ram and storage in order for us to keep up with the demands of the consumer. At that stage, anyone wanting a picture of themselves had to get access to a disposable Kodak camera, or a fancy camera like the Nikon F5 with a standard 50mm lens for low light and portrait photography or the 70–200mm telephoto lens for the animal and nature enthusiasts, not cheap.

Today, the little camera on your average Apple or Samsung cellphone can do things most of us don’t even know is possible, like RAW photo capture, which allows you to take a photo at the highest quality possible (little to no compression or adjustments are applied) and then you can edit it on your PC using an editing tool to adjust all sorts of settings like colour, contrast etc.

Pictures were never about the camera, they were never even about the scenery or meaning behind the photo taken (except for the rare true artistic photographers.) They were always mostly about the individual, seeing that photo of themselves and grinning, like Narcissus at his image in the lake, just before falling in.

Snapshots of us have become synonymous with personal branding, self-preservation and the pursuit of validation, which in turn are the cornerstone of today’s social media platforms, dating apps, professional networking apps, fitness and health apps and content creation platforms.

Surely you need no help thinking of examples for those apps mentioned above, unless you live in isolation, on a remote island, or in the jungles of Borneo or the Amazon.

The cult of the individual is outlined by “Selfie Culture” “Curated Online personas” that are nothing like their real-life counterparts and all driven by the search for validation through likes and comments and ‘easy money’.

In the hopes of sudden stardom and avalanches of digital currency, the social media cult is creating “Dopamine-enslaved Ego Zombies” or “DEEZ’ers” for short. Individuals and their followers that can be seen in all their glory shambling along on their social media pages with their puffy lips, incredible feats of dexterity, lewdness or just plain stupidity on display.

“The delusion is that your ego is the real you.” said Bruce Lee once, what seems a very long time ago and how we could do with more of that wisdom now.

T.S. Eliot once said “Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.” and this seems to be a prophetic statement because the stage is set, authenticity is nigh impossible to trace, deepfakes force us to consider the real possibility of a simulated existence, and in a reverse of the analogy, ‘can’t see the wood for the trees’, we can’t see reality for the screens unless… we disconnect and regularly!

There is another way.

The secret lies in the exercise that my beautiful wife wrote so succinctly about… removing the “I.”

The more we make life about “me, me, me” and “I, I, I,” the less connected we are to others. This in turn nourishes insecurity, which grows ever larger, demanding more individual attention and growing into an uncontrollable monster that destroys relationships and in some cases, even lives.

We are nothing.

In the greater scheme of things, we are all meat skins, riding through the universe on a blue rock, destined to be consumed by a great big ball of fire!

Our time is limited.

What we experience and those that we love, if we are lucky, are all that we can have with us in the final moments of our brief lives.

Memories are better made with others, experiences are multiplied with those we love and care for.

There is more than “I” and “me”, there is “us.”

Give ‘us’ a try.

P.s. In an attempt to get perspective and follow the challenge my wife setup in her article: i-removed a world reimagined, this article, apart from the initial ‘I’ in the heading, contains none other. Go on, give it a try!