Egoic Narratives - No. 51
Tracy Goss says in her book, The Last Word on Power, that we are meaning-making machines. We ascribe meaning to everything, and it is all driven by our past experiences. What has happened in the past helps us interpret the present and try to predict the future. The problem is that most of the meaning we ascribe to things isn’t real or accurate. As Larry Mills says, “Most of what we think just isn’t so.”
I have been going through a process of letting go of the meaning that I have ascribed to things in my life. Some of that meaning has shown up as judgment, “I would never want to do that.” But most of it is just incorrect stories that have shaped my thinking and actions. Many of these stories I let die years ago, but there are still others that I have been discovering recently. I am calling these stories we tell ourselves Egoic Narratives because they are stories that we believe because they help us define our sense of self.
Egoic narratives are self-focused stories driven by our ego. They can be simple or elaborate, but they are always about us. For instance, if I believe that dressing a certain way communicates something about me, then I am living into an egoic narrative. All sorts of social clubs, gangs, and fraternities run on these kinds of narratives. Our participation in them tells us something about ourselves and that narrative fits into the larger web of narratives we have in our minds about who we are and how the world works. It’s the same with our jobs, possessions, accomplishments and networks. We are trained and naturally inclined to see ourselves through the narratives we believe to be true.
We think more in stories than we realize. So much of the time, our differences of opinion with someone else are really the difference in the stories we believe and the stories they believe. We are not very good at objectively looking at anything, especially ourselves. In note No. 48, I talked about egoic structures, which are culturally accepted “realities” that exist simply because our egos want them to. In the example of green grass yards, humans want ways to communicate status, and that is how the American yard came to be. We don’t even question it because it’s such a staple of American culture. What drives ego structures are the narratives attached to them. I want to be seen as a successful person who has their life together, so having a beautiful lawn signals to me, my neighbors, and friends that I am that kind of person. Of course, nowadays a nice lawn is less of a status symbol than it was a couple of hundred years ago, but it helps illustrate the point that what drives most people’s lives are egoic narratives. Our cultural egoic structures and the egoic treadmill I wrote about in Note No. 50 run on these narratives.
One ego narrative I believed in was around watches. If I wore a nice watch, then it made me feel more successful, and I also believed it made other people think I was more successful. Something as simple as a watch played into a web of stories I had about myself and how I wanted to be seen. Another one was around business travel, if I was traveling a lot for work, then it meant I was important. I used to feel better about myself when I was traveling for work a lot, and felt good telling people I needed to go to LA for a meeting with a client. The funny thing is I don’t enjoy flying or staying in hotels. So in a funny way, I was wanting to do something that I didn’t really want to do. Getting freedom from this broken narrative has made my life so much better. Many trips didn’t really need to happen, and a Zoom call works just fine. I still like watches, but I don’t want to be someone who needs to wear them, and it’s so nice not to let something silly like a watch affect how I feel about myself. Egoic narratives become prison bars we voluntarily lock ourselves behind, and they get much more sinister than watches and business travel. People bankrupt themselves and ruin their marriages trying to “keep up appearances.” What will people think of me if I can’t afford this house, or this membership or this trip anymore?
Larry Mills has a piece of art that I love called, “Consumption.” It’s a map of the United States made out of cardboard boxes from all sorts of companies. In the center of the art piece, it says, “We buy things we don’t need, with money we don’t have, to impress people we don’t know.” What a picture of the power of ego narratives.
Think of industries like beauty and fitness: the reason they’re as big as they are is because we have cultural stories to tell us we need to be fit and attractive. If health instead of appearances were the primary drivers behind those industries, then they would look very different. Most of social media is driven by the impulse to craft how people see us and perceive us. We can curate an image of ourselves that tells a story we like to ourselves and everyone else. The problem is that these broken narratives put us in prison. We become enslaved to the ego narratives that run our lives.
Getting past narratives.
We would all greatly benefit from getting free of our ego narratives. When we begin to let go of these broken and sometimes destructive stories we tell ourselves, we start to see our life, ourselves, and others more clearly. Instead of living into a story, we must instead live from identity. This can be terrifying; you can find yourself feeling lost without the narratives that defined you. When I let go of some of my biggest narratives, I had to rediscover who I really was. The stories I told myself had become so strong that they felt like a part of me. I found myself thinking, at times, maybe I really am a failure because my ego stories said if I wasn’t a millionaire by 30, I was a failure.
We can’t replace broken narratives with new, possibly better narratives, we need to get out of the narrative business altogether. Instead of coming up with a better measure of my success, I had to let go of all my definitions of success and stop pursuing them. I also had to let go of my definitions of failure and stop being afraid of it. Because success and failure are just stories we tell ourselves. Instead of constantly wrestling with the pursuit of success and the fear of failure, the main question became, “Am I becoming who God created me to be?” Instead of worrying about how others perceive me, I got to spend my energy on walking the path that God has for me. The brain power that used to go into comparison could now be directed towards understanding how God created me to live. The process of uncovering our true identity and learning to live from it is a serious undertaking.
One of the most helpful things I did as I was trying to unplug from the ego narratives in my heart and mind was quitting social media. The time I spent on social platforms was playing into my ego narratives. It was all too easy to compare myself to other people, which only made me feel farther and farther behind. When I unplugged from all that noise, it became easier to focus on living my life as a disciple of Jesus.
Most people aren’t trying to live their own life, they are trying to live someone else’s. We see people who have accomplished things we admire, and we want to be like them, and that is often how our ego narratives are born. When we are young, it might be an athlete, a movie star, or an influencer. As we get older, it’s often a business person, a community leader, a podcaster or a friend. Ego narratives are often born out of trying to be like someone else and live a life like theirs. Getting free from those narratives allows us to live the only life that will actually be fulfilling; our own life, the life we were created to live. Imagine a world where what you do doesn’t define who you are and where your highest purpose in life is to become who God made you to be. That’s the world you live in, but in order to see it and experience it, you have to let go of the broken narratives that have shaped your view of reality. It’s like taking VR glasses off and realizing life is not a game to be won, but an adventure to be lived.
We were made to be beautifully free and alive, living from our true identities in union with God. Instead of living into egoic narratives, we were made to live inside of the one great story in which we all play a unique part.
“The only true joy on earth is to escape from the prison of our own false self and enter by love into union with the Life Who dwells and sings within the essence of every creature and in the core of our own souls.” - Thomas Merton
- John Walt
