STREET DOGS

From Ego is the Enemy by Steven Pressfield:

Freud was fond of explaining the ego by way of analogy — our ego was the rider on a horse, with our unconscious drives representing the animal, while the ego tried to direct them.

Modern psychologists, on the other hand, use the word “egotist” to refer to someone dangerously focused on themselves and with disregard for anyone else.

The ego we see most commonly goes by a more casual definition: an unhealthy belief in our own importance. Arrogance. Self-centred ambition. It’s that petulant child in every person, the one that chooses getting his or her way over anything or anyone else. The need to be better than, more than, recognised for, far past any reasonable utility — that’s ego. It’s the sense of superiority and certainty that exceeds the bounds of confidence and talent.

It’s when the notion of ourselves and the world grows so inflated that it begins to distort the reality that surrounds us.

When, as the football coach Bill Walsh explained, “selfconfidence becomes arrogance, assertiveness becomes obstinacy and self-assurance becomes reckless abandon. This is the ego, as the writer Cyril Connolly warned, that sucks us down like the law of gravity.”

In this way, ego is the enemy of what you want and of what you have; of mastering a craft. Of real creative insight. Of working well with others. Of building loyalty and support. Of longevity. Of repeating and retaining your success. It repulses advantages and opportunities. It’s a magnet for enemies and errors … at the root of almost every conceivable problem and obstacle.

We don’t usually see it this way. We think something else is to blame for our failures. The egotist is, as the poet Lucretius put it a few thousand years ago, “the proverbial sick man ignorant of the cause of his malady”.