Why would it be counterproductive? It is productive for living a happy life and generating social utility for others. It is often not so productive for generating technical or scientific utility for others, but this later is just more of a correlation, and as such it was always understood that it is often a trade-off between these two, Fritz Zwicky predicted supernovae but you really, really didn’t want to work in the same room with him. Reducing the ego may reduce STEM interest, but not necessarily so, it could be that it transforms into a curiosity-based one like Feynman’s case.
The problem is IMHO that you consider achievement a terminal value and a rather exclusionary or overriding one. If there are terminal values at all, happiness or inner piece is a better one. Why achieve for the sake of achievement? I would rather not achieve anything and be happy than the opposite although the ideal would be to do both. Why would be working hard a sine qua non terminal value?
Even if you have this worky work work then work more type of value system, which does not rhyme with mine, it is still crucially important to be able to intelligently choose what to work on. This is why throwing ego into what you work on can be a huge problem. It anchors you. You tied down your ego into being the best typewriter repairman then technology moves on and ooops. Or not being able to give up an avenue of research that is not fruitful because you linked your ego to it and now it would be too painful to admit you were wrong. One remarkable thing about the Dalai Lama is that he can sit up on a stage watched by ten thousand people there and more on TV, get asked a question, and answer “I don’t know” in a completely unfazed, smiling, no-fucks-given way. He’s got zero ego invested into some kind of a wise-Yoda-who-knows-all role (which is how people tend to see him). This is the advantage in it. It would be SO easy to just come up with a cryptic mysteriously wise deep answer to just to protect his either external image or internal self-image, yet he doesn’t, and that is a fairly great thing.
So at least one productive advantage of small egos is being able to change what you work on and being able to admit when you were wrong.
Your internal/external distinction is interesting. I would say, this type of very external attitude is small-ego. For example there are tennis players who care about winning and continuous improvement towards winning and nothing else and they are very critical with themselves, “I played really crappy today” because that is how you improve. They want to actually win, not feel like a winner. And it is a small ego thing, because their eyes are on the goal and not on themselves. People who have a big ego are the opposite, there is an excuse for every lost match, there is an excuse for everything, because very invested into feeling like being good at it.
I don’t know how would a professional psychologist formulate it, but being focused on reaching external goals is definitely more small-ego and healthier than making sure you feel like and look like a winner through excuses and rationalizations, the later would be the big-ego case. And precisely that is difficult to overcome. As far as I can remember, when I was a child, all the children did the later. Every failed school test was excused. Growing up is overcoming it, but it is not even nearly universal nor easy that this happens.
The problem is IMHO that you consider achievement a terminal value and a rather exclusionary or overriding one. If there are terminal values at all, happiness or inner piece is a better one. Why achieve for the sake of achievement?
Achievement means taking actions in the real world. Inner peace is a fundamentally selfish pursuit. I could equally ask, why seek inner peace?
This is why throwing ego into what you work on can be a huge problem. It anchors you.
Anchors are good as well as bad, you know. A good ship is one that can both lift and drop the anchor, not one that doesn’t have one.
Your internal/external distinction is interesting. I would say, this type of very external attitude is small-ego. For example there are tennis players who care about winning and continuous improvement towards winning and nothing else and they are very critical with themselves, “I played really crappy today” because that is how you improve. They want to actually win, not feel like a winner. And it is a small ego thing, because their eyes are on the goal and not on themselves.
See, it’s interesting, because I agree with you that this behaviour is ideal, but it seems to me to be the opposite of what you claim elsewhere. These people do not have inner peace. They are not “extremely content with [themselves] as people.” They are, as you say, intensely self-critical. Interestingly, they seem to be driven not so much by the desire to succeed as the desire not to lose—all the top professionals seem to talk about how physically painful it is to lose, and similar. Their focus is not on “living a happy life and generating social utility for others” it’s on achievement (and in a zero-sum game, to boot).
In any sane description, these people have invested their ego in being the best at tennis. This isn’t keeping your ego small, in any sane description. Now, you are right that one possible problem mode is to redefine the terms of what it means to be “the best,” so as to excuse failure, but this is almost the definitional problem of the small-ego case, where you always “win” because there’s no way to declare your life a failure.
We can draw up a 2*2 table:
Invest your ego in being the best, judge by external achievements—Roger Federer
Invest your ego in being the best, judge by internal processes—Harvard sociologist
Don’t invest your ego in being the best, judge by external achievements—Nepalese peasant
Don’t invest your ego in being the best, judge by internal processes—Jeffrey Lebowski
I admit it is an incredibly difficult thing to express in words, because 1) it is not very well observable for others 2) for the individual in question, it is an inner attitude not an external object, and observing them accurate is FAR harder.
One way to verbalize it with some amount of accuracy is that the problem is not selfishness but self-centeredness. The problem is focusing the attention on the self. Often it is a negative one like a nagging doubt of worthlessness but still self-attention. It is better to focus it outward, keeping it on goals, and look on the self only if the self -as a tool—needs changing in order to become more efficient for pursuing the goals. Even if the goals are selfish, still it is better to focus the attention on selfish goals than on the self itself. And of course on unselfish goals even better. E.g. Lama Ole Nydahl: “I think of myself more as a program than as a person. I am what I have promised I will do.” This is a form of dynamic inner peace. No nagging doubts.
It is possible to have goals without having desire, but it is a bit complicated. Again it can easily devolve into arguing the definitions of words, but basically typically a desire means feeling incomplete without something, and it is possible to pursue alturistic or curiosity based goals without this. But it is rare and hard.
These people do not have inner peace. They are not “extremely content with [themselves] as people.” They are, as you say, intensely self-critical.
This is really complicated to express in words. My point is more like that the efficient tennis player is self-critical only so far as it is necessary for self-improvement. Does not dwell or ruminate on it. Does not wallow in masochistic self-hatred. Finds what sucks, fixes it, and instantly takes his attention off his self and puts it back on the goal. This is peaceful enough, close to a “flow”. They are not content with how they played, but they are content with themselves as such, as persons, as overall people, HENCE they don’t feel the need to either act out artificial roles, project false images, excuse away failures or ruminate.
Anchor: now having a heavy ego but being able to control it at will instead of being enslaved by it is a very novel idea to me. It happens?
E.g. Lama Ole Nydahl: “I think of myself more as a program than as a person. I am what I have promised I will do.” This is a form of dynamic inner peace.
On the other hand, if you don’t call yourself a Lama and express the same idea as “I don’t have any actual desires, I feel like I’m just going through the motions of living, doing what I have to do”, you are well on you way to being diagnosed with depression.
You guys keep telling me I am depressed, sooner or later I will even believe it :) Seriously, put yourself into the shoes of say a blue collar guy 100 years ago in the first world. He must eat. Hence he must work. 14 hours a day. And that pretty much described all. Having a life not driven by necessities is pretty big a privilege. Why would we consider the opposite of it depression instead of normal? Or look at animals, they do everything because they must. Only humans really choose. To me being driven by necessities is pretty normal and I don’t really understand why should it be a mental illness. It’s just the lack of luxury basically.
But, yes, it is not really the happiest ways to live, sure, and I think about the essence of your comment it is so that things on the low and and the high end can look very similar when described with words. When you look at the actual experience such as when how much joy people’s faces radiate then not.
I don’t know why but the low end superficially similar to the high type of heuristic works surprisingly well in many human things. For example alpha males don’t chase women, they let them chased by them, beta males chase women, gamma males don’t chase women because they think they are unworthy for their love.
I too don’t know why does this heuristic work but it does. I think it is something like, non-climbers don’t climb mountains, climbers who have already climbed the mountain and are on top don’t climb it either, so it is superficially similar non-climbing, and those climbers who have not yet climbed it are climbing. Or healthy people don’t get healing medical treatments, people dying also don’t really healing treatments just palliative ones, people who are ill but have hope healing get healing treatments. You could lack desires because you are too unhappy or because you are too happy. Something like that.
Also note that you’re coming from the region tainted with Weber’s Protestant work ethic X-)
being driven by necessities is pretty normal and I don’t really understand why should it be a mental illness
Depression isn’t about being driven by necessities. In this particular context “not having desires” is the important part. I understand that from the Buddhist point of view that’s entirely backwards :-)
[Edited to remove incorrectly applied cached language]
There’s a difference between self-obsession and self-worth. The most narcissistic people I know all hate themselves; I couldn’t hazard to guess which way causality flows there. I rarely think of myself, but I doubt you have ever met anybody who thinks as highly of themselves as I do.
The issue is that we have a single word—“ego”—to describe both of these things.
Yes and I don’t even know the history of the word, how the meaning changed. Esp. that it was in Buddhist centers with Tibetan stuff all over it where this word I heard used the most often—yet what business does a Latin word have there at all? It may be a reuse. “Meditation” is actually a reuse and a pretty lossy one—it used to mean “thinking things over”.
We have very similar threads running parallel right now. We both converged on the important thing being that ego is tied to something outside of oneself, rather than self-referential self conception. I called it “truth+outcome orientation” and you called it “external”. Do you have thoughts on my conceptualization of it?
Unlike yours, I think ego size is irrelevant. A person with a small ego cares not what others think, nor do they really care what they think of themselves and thus live free from pain and guilt but also pride… however, they can still care about underlying reality a lot in a consequentialist sense.
Whereas, a person with a very large ego might have virtue-ethics style self perceptions tied to how they behaved in a certain scenario, which comes out to the same thing if they’re philosophically consequentialists. Essentially rendering ego size irrelevant except as a personality difference which will manifest in social presentation and emotions.
Your external vs internal dichotomy means “self opinion vs. others opinions”.
But truth+outcome orientation with low ego means “focusing primarily on the effect you have on reality,
disregarding both the opinions of others and your self perceptions.”
and truth+outcome orientation with high ego means “tying your self perception to the effect you have on reality, disregarding the opinions of others, and not trying to trick your own self perception but still being emotionally driven by it.”
Why would it be counterproductive? It is productive for living a happy life and generating social utility for others. It is often not so productive for generating technical or scientific utility for others, but this later is just more of a correlation, and as such it was always understood that it is often a trade-off between these two, Fritz Zwicky predicted supernovae but you really, really didn’t want to work in the same room with him. Reducing the ego may reduce STEM interest, but not necessarily so, it could be that it transforms into a curiosity-based one like Feynman’s case.
The problem is IMHO that you consider achievement a terminal value and a rather exclusionary or overriding one. If there are terminal values at all, happiness or inner piece is a better one. Why achieve for the sake of achievement? I would rather not achieve anything and be happy than the opposite although the ideal would be to do both. Why would be working hard a sine qua non terminal value?
Even if you have this worky work work then work more type of value system, which does not rhyme with mine, it is still crucially important to be able to intelligently choose what to work on. This is why throwing ego into what you work on can be a huge problem. It anchors you. You tied down your ego into being the best typewriter repairman then technology moves on and ooops. Or not being able to give up an avenue of research that is not fruitful because you linked your ego to it and now it would be too painful to admit you were wrong. One remarkable thing about the Dalai Lama is that he can sit up on a stage watched by ten thousand people there and more on TV, get asked a question, and answer “I don’t know” in a completely unfazed, smiling, no-fucks-given way. He’s got zero ego invested into some kind of a wise-Yoda-who-knows-all role (which is how people tend to see him). This is the advantage in it. It would be SO easy to just come up with a cryptic mysteriously wise deep answer to just to protect his either external image or internal self-image, yet he doesn’t, and that is a fairly great thing.
So at least one productive advantage of small egos is being able to change what you work on and being able to admit when you were wrong.
Your internal/external distinction is interesting. I would say, this type of very external attitude is small-ego. For example there are tennis players who care about winning and continuous improvement towards winning and nothing else and they are very critical with themselves, “I played really crappy today” because that is how you improve. They want to actually win, not feel like a winner. And it is a small ego thing, because their eyes are on the goal and not on themselves. People who have a big ego are the opposite, there is an excuse for every lost match, there is an excuse for everything, because very invested into feeling like being good at it.
I don’t know how would a professional psychologist formulate it, but being focused on reaching external goals is definitely more small-ego and healthier than making sure you feel like and look like a winner through excuses and rationalizations, the later would be the big-ego case. And precisely that is difficult to overcome. As far as I can remember, when I was a child, all the children did the later. Every failed school test was excused. Growing up is overcoming it, but it is not even nearly universal nor easy that this happens.
Achievement means taking actions in the real world. Inner peace is a fundamentally selfish pursuit. I could equally ask, why seek inner peace?
Anchors are good as well as bad, you know. A good ship is one that can both lift and drop the anchor, not one that doesn’t have one.
See, it’s interesting, because I agree with you that this behaviour is ideal, but it seems to me to be the opposite of what you claim elsewhere. These people do not have inner peace. They are not “extremely content with [themselves] as people.” They are, as you say, intensely self-critical. Interestingly, they seem to be driven not so much by the desire to succeed as the desire not to lose—all the top professionals seem to talk about how physically painful it is to lose, and similar. Their focus is not on “living a happy life and generating social utility for others” it’s on achievement (and in a zero-sum game, to boot).
In any sane description, these people have invested their ego in being the best at tennis. This isn’t keeping your ego small, in any sane description. Now, you are right that one possible problem mode is to redefine the terms of what it means to be “the best,” so as to excuse failure, but this is almost the definitional problem of the small-ego case, where you always “win” because there’s no way to declare your life a failure.
We can draw up a 2*2 table:
Invest your ego in being the best, judge by external achievements—Roger Federer
Invest your ego in being the best, judge by internal processes—Harvard sociologist
Don’t invest your ego in being the best, judge by external achievements—Nepalese peasant
Don’t invest your ego in being the best, judge by internal processes—Jeffrey Lebowski
I admit it is an incredibly difficult thing to express in words, because 1) it is not very well observable for others 2) for the individual in question, it is an inner attitude not an external object, and observing them accurate is FAR harder.
One way to verbalize it with some amount of accuracy is that the problem is not selfishness but self-centeredness. The problem is focusing the attention on the self. Often it is a negative one like a nagging doubt of worthlessness but still self-attention. It is better to focus it outward, keeping it on goals, and look on the self only if the self -as a tool—needs changing in order to become more efficient for pursuing the goals. Even if the goals are selfish, still it is better to focus the attention on selfish goals than on the self itself. And of course on unselfish goals even better. E.g. Lama Ole Nydahl: “I think of myself more as a program than as a person. I am what I have promised I will do.” This is a form of dynamic inner peace. No nagging doubts.
It is possible to have goals without having desire, but it is a bit complicated. Again it can easily devolve into arguing the definitions of words, but basically typically a desire means feeling incomplete without something, and it is possible to pursue alturistic or curiosity based goals without this. But it is rare and hard.
This is really complicated to express in words. My point is more like that the efficient tennis player is self-critical only so far as it is necessary for self-improvement. Does not dwell or ruminate on it. Does not wallow in masochistic self-hatred. Finds what sucks, fixes it, and instantly takes his attention off his self and puts it back on the goal. This is peaceful enough, close to a “flow”. They are not content with how they played, but they are content with themselves as such, as persons, as overall people, HENCE they don’t feel the need to either act out artificial roles, project false images, excuse away failures or ruminate.
Anchor: now having a heavy ego but being able to control it at will instead of being enslaved by it is a very novel idea to me. It happens?
On the other hand, if you don’t call yourself a Lama and express the same idea as “I don’t have any actual desires, I feel like I’m just going through the motions of living, doing what I have to do”, you are well on you way to being diagnosed with depression.
Whether it’s depression or not depends on whether you are distressed by the thought.
You guys keep telling me I am depressed, sooner or later I will even believe it :) Seriously, put yourself into the shoes of say a blue collar guy 100 years ago in the first world. He must eat. Hence he must work. 14 hours a day. And that pretty much described all. Having a life not driven by necessities is pretty big a privilege. Why would we consider the opposite of it depression instead of normal? Or look at animals, they do everything because they must. Only humans really choose. To me being driven by necessities is pretty normal and I don’t really understand why should it be a mental illness. It’s just the lack of luxury basically.
But, yes, it is not really the happiest ways to live, sure, and I think about the essence of your comment it is so that things on the low and and the high end can look very similar when described with words. When you look at the actual experience such as when how much joy people’s faces radiate then not.
I don’t know why but the low end superficially similar to the high type of heuristic works surprisingly well in many human things. For example alpha males don’t chase women, they let them chased by them, beta males chase women, gamma males don’t chase women because they think they are unworthy for their love.
I too don’t know why does this heuristic work but it does. I think it is something like, non-climbers don’t climb mountains, climbers who have already climbed the mountain and are on top don’t climb it either, so it is superficially similar non-climbing, and those climbers who have not yet climbed it are climbing. Or healthy people don’t get healing medical treatments, people dying also don’t really healing treatments just palliative ones, people who are ill but have hope healing get healing treatments. You could lack desires because you are too unhappy or because you are too happy. Something like that.
No, I don’t think so. See e.g. this.
Also note that you’re coming from the region tainted with Weber’s Protestant work ethic X-)
Depression isn’t about being driven by necessities. In this particular context “not having desires” is the important part. I understand that from the Buddhist point of view that’s entirely backwards :-)
[Edited to remove incorrectly applied cached language]
There’s a difference between self-obsession and self-worth. The most narcissistic people I know all hate themselves; I couldn’t hazard to guess which way causality flows there. I rarely think of myself, but I doubt you have ever met anybody who thinks as highly of themselves as I do.
The issue is that we have a single word—“ego”—to describe both of these things.
Yes and I don’t even know the history of the word, how the meaning changed. Esp. that it was in Buddhist centers with Tibetan stuff all over it where this word I heard used the most often—yet what business does a Latin word have there at all? It may be a reuse. “Meditation” is actually a reuse and a pretty lossy one—it used to mean “thinking things over”.
We have very similar threads running parallel right now. We both converged on the important thing being that ego is tied to something outside of oneself, rather than self-referential self conception. I called it “truth+outcome orientation” and you called it “external”. Do you have thoughts on my conceptualization of it?
Unlike yours, I think ego size is irrelevant. A person with a small ego cares not what others think, nor do they really care what they think of themselves and thus live free from pain and guilt but also pride… however, they can still care about underlying reality a lot in a consequentialist sense.
Whereas, a person with a very large ego might have virtue-ethics style self perceptions tied to how they behaved in a certain scenario, which comes out to the same thing if they’re philosophically consequentialists. Essentially rendering ego size irrelevant except as a personality difference which will manifest in social presentation and emotions.
Your external vs internal dichotomy means “self opinion vs. others opinions”.
But truth+outcome orientation with low ego means “focusing primarily on the effect you have on reality, disregarding both the opinions of others and your self perceptions.”
and truth+outcome orientation with high ego means “tying your self perception to the effect you have on reality, disregarding the opinions of others, and not trying to trick your own self perception but still being emotionally driven by it.”