A response, at the last minute, to IndieWeb Carnival: On Ego

The first time I really remember my ego screwing me was when in high school. My response to Colors in August 2025 included that story. A teenager who was told for years he was good at drawing was confronted by a criticism. That teen–me–shut down fully. It’s a story that still, 40 years on, stings.

That story stays in my heart, if not my mind, because it left a mark on my soul.

It will never leave.

The lesson: ego is stupid.

But is ego useless? Is it possible to be ego-less?

Sigmund Freud talked of ego, id, and superego. It was a framework for understanding the human psyche. Ego, in that framework, is not the top. “Egotistical” is the word we give to people with inflated self worth.

Decades on I know that the “good” ego is that superego. It’s my conscience: self-critical part. The part that can look at my behavior carefully and consider as evenhandedly as possible what I’m accountable for: what I did right, what I did wrong.

12-step groups talk of continuous self-inventory. They encourage one to reflect and be incredibly honest with oneself. The language is that we must make a “a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.”

It is hard work.

I didn’t have anything like that as a teen. I could not see myself. I depended on the judgements of others. Whether I was too fat, or behaved badly, or was doing a great job, or whether I was on track. I deferred to others. I was plenty smart! But I deployed my powers of perception and intelligence outward. I was told I was brilliant. A star. That brilliant starlight traveled exclusively outward. Inside, I was collapsing star. It would be decades later before I had a reasonable self-knowledge. It took a painful divorce to get a proper and working superego.

My wish for everyone would be to get to a place where they can be self-critical without beating themselves up and without over inflating their ego as soon as is practical.

Uselessly, I have no simple instruction manual to do so. I only learned it through pain.

My hope is that it’s not a necessity. But… well, it might be.

And that’s where I’ll end this post.

Thanks Bix, for hosting this, and sorry it’s nearly late. UTC time has ticked over the day to November. But here in my time zone October lingers.