Ego in the Age of Personal Branding
I completed “Ego Is The Enemy” two days ago. And it’s primarily at a time of a moral, say, an existentialist crisis of my life. It comes to me as a great shock, so epic that I have to question most decisions of late as I struggle with self-restraint as a millennial caught up in an inevitable moral crisis. Looking back now, I would say in a court of moral evaluations; I plead guilty and depraved. It seems to me that I’ve been quoting Socrates’ “the unexamined life is not worth living”, out of mere fantasy with no practical application. And after reading the last page of the book, I literally prowled down the stairs to absorb and get relief from what I had just read. As I stand on the balcony overlooking the pool, breeze blowing through my nostrils and began to reflect, I experienced the most guilty moment in my life, and I can’t begin to tell how humbling it’s been since. Examining the life I have lived and the one I crave for on screens that flash in my face, the ones on social media, is horrible, to say the least. And reading these pages have humbled my soul and brought me on bended knees about how flawed we become when we let ego dictate to us.
In “Ego is the Enemy”, Ryan explores the lives of men who have far outlived the memories of their time or by far, served as moral epitomes or few with egotistical narcissism that destroyed their lives and careers. Two of such men were Alexandra the Great and Napoleon. Alexandra created one of the world’s largest empires. His life was an early success. He was thirty-two, brilliant, brave and had a good mentor. But he was arrogant. He was egotistical. His arrogance destroyed his life and imploded his empire. Ryan writes, Alexandra the Great, despite, conquering the entire known world was blinded by his ego, and his brilliance and bravery were still lacking an important lesson of life — virtue and humility. In the book, Alexandra the Great Failure, John Grainger writes that “Alexander was king of a society where the ruler was absolutely central to the well-being of society as a whole.” With this concentration of power, ego reigned and ruined his life.
Ego is colossally destructive and self-inducing. With little power, it mesmerises and corrupts you. You think the world revolves around you and you deserve admiration and respect from everyone. You want to be to be seen everywhere. This was the case with Alexandra the Great, and it accounts for his “premature death.” In a world of “BIG ME’ and “PERSONAL BRAND”, Ryan writes that “we’re required to tell stories in order to sell our work and talents, and after enough time, forget where the line is that separates our fiction from reality.” And if anything the world has transitioned to, except the rise of science and technology, is that we’ve lost the thread that guild us — from moral principles, humility to self-centeredness, personal brand, vainglory and arrogance.
In College, we’re all told to brand ourselves. Our careers require us to buy the impression of people, and as a result, we suddenly think we’re too important especially amid little success. Ego is feeling important and overthinking of yourself as unique, as different and entitled because you feel you’re better. Ego makes most of us think that we’re missing out on life because we’re not at the level we deserve to be. What do we do next? We become desperate for instant glorification and recognition. When it’s your birthday, you want everyone to post your pictures and say nice things about you because you’re special. With little knowledge you want everyone to tell you’re smart and you become too much of yourself. You become delusional, pride and look down on people. You not only deny yourself an essential part of life, but you also deprive yourself of your learning curve of growth and blind your eyes to your flaws because of pride. CS Lewis once echoed that, “a pride man is always looking down on people; and of course, as long as you are looking down, you can’t see something that is above you.” You destroy yourself in its infancy, and you get paranoid about success and other people. Ego, as Ryan writes “leads to envy and deludes the mind of the holder. We’re all trying to prove something even to people we don’t respect” and result to craving and getting things we don’t even want.
Because of ego, most of us walk around thinking people care about how we look, or what we eat and say, and becomes deluded by that. Come to think of it, how many times have you questioned your appearance because you assume everyone’s going to mock you because of how you look? How many times have you questioned your self-worth because you assume people would doubt you? How many times have you done something not because you want to, but that you want to impress people to like you? These are questions, our generation struggles with, and it’s genuinely an embarrassing question in and of itself. The age of social media has made us self-obsessed, and we become as Ryan writes “deranged by fame and a demagogic spree of self-gratification and obsession” and our culture now takes “delusions for confidence. Ignorance for courage. And desperation for ambition.” And unlike any of these, “it’s ego because we’re high on the struggle for fame and being counted as important.”
In the age of social media, most of us have graduated before our butts touch college benches because of our ego and false ideas about ourselves. With this, Ryan asks an important question that “everyone wants material wealth, success and recognition. How many people are humble enough to achieve that? The pretence of knowledge in this generation especially encapsulates into our culture of ego. Ryan posits that “ the pretence of knowledge is our most dangerous vice, because it prevents us from getting any better”. Yet his solution is that “studious self-assessment is the antidote”, humility and remaining a student for the rest of your life. Humility as Wynton Marsalis once wrote “engenders learning because it beats back the arrogance that puts blinders on. It leaves you open for truths to reveal themselves, you don’t stand in your own way.” And his test for knowing if one is humble as he believes “is one simple test: because they consistently observe and listen, the humble improve. They don’t assume, “I know they way.”
As most of us remain intoxicated with ego and self-petulance, Ryan writes that it’s good to keep a few things in mind: “You’re not nearly good or as important as you think you are. You have an attitude that needs to be readjusted. Most of what you think you know or most of what you have learned in books or in school is out of date or wrong.” With this comes an excellent lesson for humility.
