By helping others we may feel a sense of self-worth, but won’t it increase our ego too?

Answer Podcast

If we, when we are depressed, we give something to someone, we do something for someone, that might help us to deal with the depression, but are we feeding the ego by that? Not necessarily. The word ego can have a negative connotation or it can just have a functional designation.
Ego can refer to arrogance or conceit or self-centeredness. I think I am so great and everybody else is useless. But basically ego can just refer also to a center of awareness.
Sometimes in philosophical circles, there is a difference between ego and false ego. So false ego means imagining that we are something which we are not. It’s megalomania.
I am thinking I am this big, big person. But ego means that I am. In a functional sense, we are a center of awareness.
We are a conscious agent who chooses and acts. So we all need a sense of self-worth. We all need a sense that we can make a difference.
Without that basic sense of self-worth, we will not be able to function at all. We are, each one of us, very tiny. We are infinitesimal.
But although we are infinitesimal, that doesn’t mean that we count for nothing. Our actions, our choices, they count at least for our future and they count for the future of people around us. So it’s when we see that we can make a difference, then that gives us a sense of purpose, a sense of energy.
And because we live in such a competitive society, where we are often defined in terms of comparison with others. So many people, they often oscillate between between grandiosity and depression. Grandiosity.
I am such a great person. I was reading a book about why there are mental health problems, especially among Ivy League students. In India we can have IITs.
I was just a few months ago in IIT Kharagpur and there one of the leading professors, he had come to meet me and said that we need some kind of counseling or some kind of wisdom to encourage our students to seek alternatives to suicide when they have problems. They found in IIT Mumbai that so many people, so many young people committed suicide that they became alarmed and the management decided to invest, do something about it. And they found all the students were committing suicide in one typical way.
They would they would have these electric fans, they would turn on the fan and they would have a rope hanging from it and they would put that rope around their neck and then they would turn on the fan button. So when they started doing so, the management met and they decided on an emergency basis to replace all the fans with air conditioners. Now that can deal with the that can deal with the specific way in which people are committing suicide but that is not dealing with the mentality.
The point which I am making here is so this book in my social observer, he says he interviewed many Ivy League students so they said that, one of the students he said that half of the time in my, I would feel so great thinking of how I am better than everyone else. And half of the time I would feel depressed thinking how everyone else is better than me. So basically if we define because we are in a competitive world naturally we will be compared with others.
But that can be a social comparison. That doesn’t have to be a self-defining comparison. It’s failure in life is a practical problem.
It is not an existential problem. Practical problem is okay, I tried to do this, it didn’t work. Should I do this again or should I do something else? It’s a practical issue.
But when it becomes an existential problem that means because of that failure I start thinking that I am worth nothing. When failure instead of seeing that as an event in our life, we let it become the defining event of our life. It may be failure in an exam, failure in a project, failure in a job, failure in a relationship.
These can happen in our life and they will affect us but they don’t have to define us. So to deal with all these negativities that will come upon us, we need a sense of self-worth that is not dependent on these things. And having that sense of self-worth is actually essential for our psychological health.
Ego will come when we are too defined by our externals. So if I can do something for someone then I am a very good person. If I can’t do anything for someone what is the value of my life? Yes, it’s not maybe in a functional sense like that but in an essential sense I am an individual, I am a part of the divine, there is a spark of the divine within me and I have value and significance to my existence independent of what contributions I am making right now.
But if we make contributions that helps us see that, take that conception simply from a thought to a reality. So if we contribute and we focus so much on this makes me better than others then that’s when it feeds the ego. But if this just helps me to understand that I too can contribute then that doesn’t have to feed the ego.
So it’s how we perceive that it is. Whether it is feeding our sense of self-worth or whether it is nourishing our sense of self-worth or whether it is inflating our sense of superiority over others. So only when it inflates our sense of superiority that’s when it feeds the ego.
But when it just nourishes our sense of self-worth then that is positive. Yes, right.