Everyone is experiencing them but what is an ‘ego death’?

David Harbour is the latest celebrity to experience ego death. At least, that was what he said in a recent interview with the Stranger Things star published in GQ. “It’s all just ego,” he told the magazine during a conversation about his own fame. “It seems kind of silly to say this, but the art that I’m creating is about you. It’s not about me. It’s about your experience of life. We get hung up on (the person themselves), and I think we get lost in the idea of, like, what it’s really about. And I think, for me, it’s dangerous, too, to get lost in the personality in any way.”

The 50-year-old actor went on, serving up further world salad: “That’s part of the problem — people believe the hype, they get into the image, they forget that it’s all just... I mean, I’m not the same person I was this morning. It’s all impermanent. It’s all gonna change. It’s all gonna die. And that’s very, very much deeply in my heart now. At 20, (life) was gonna go on forever.” Harbour might not have referenced the phrase “ego death” himself (it’s in the article’s headline) but frankly, he didn’t need to. Because by now, an ego death is an established part of modern-day parlance. On TikTok, there are myriad videos on the subject, featuring so-called “experts” delivering short, snappy sermons about the importance of undergoing an ego death as some form of spiritual awakening. “When people ask what I’ve been up to but I can’t say I’ve been rewiring my whole nervous system, had an ego death, and unlearning cycles of toxic behaviours so I just say, ‘working a lot’,” reads the caption over one viral clip featuring a man walking alone at sunset with the hashtags: “#relatable” and “#selfcare”.

It’s something celebrities talk about particularly frequently, so much so that it’s one of many punchlines in Apple TV’s critical hit, The Studio, a razor-sharp satire of Hollywood’s movers and shakers. At one point, a famous actress accidentally overdoses on magic mushrooms and must deliver an important speech while talking in tongues. “She’s having an ego death!” one person shouts, successfully ameliorating any concerns. Going off these slightly ambiguous references, the term “ego death” itself could literally mean anything. It’s having an existential crisis and coming out the other side. It’s having a long conversation with a family member or close friend and feeling changed by it. It’s realising the world doesn’t revolve around you and using that as evidence of spiritual enlightenment. It’s a particularly potent trip on psychedelics. It’s the revival that comes after an anxiety-inducing hangover. This rhetoric forms part of a long line of pop psychology that has been dominating online discourse for some time now. Therapy-speak has become so widespread on social media that it’s almost impossible to know what any of it means, if anything at all beyond a bid to hack Instagram’s algorithm and go viral. “Terms like ‘ego death’, ’narcissism’, ’trauma’, and ’triggered’ have all become social media terms that get hollowed out to the point that it is not always clear if they are used in an informed way or thrown around without much meaning at all,” says Dr Greg Madison, an existential psychologist and chartered member of the British Psychological Society. The first thing people are getting wrong about “ego death” is that it shouldn’t be spoken about as fact. “It is a hypothetical construct,” says Dr Madison, noting that its psychological use originated from Freud, for whom the term originally simply referred to someone’s sense of self.

“It was a pivotal part of his way of conceptualising the dynamics in the human psyche: the pull between our instincts, our conscience and our socialisation,” explains Dr Madison. “The ego tries to keep us rational and functioning according to convention. It wants to keep us out of jail and earning a living. However, in everyday language ‘ego’ has also come to mean grandiosity and the constant need to accumulate esteem to prove our superiority, ironically in order to assure ourselves we are good enough.” It’s because of this contemporary understanding that has given rise to the concept of the “ego death” aka the constant need for one’s ego to be quashed so as to make space for other, more benevolent, parts of ourselves, like empathy, tolerance and compassion. “An ‘ego death’, therefore, can seem like a liberation from the confines of a too-small and constantly managed sense of identity or freedom from parochial forms of the conventional,” adds Dr Madison.

As for how the ego death became a part of the pop psychology pit, that’s thanks to Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist for whom the term was synonymous with “psychic death”, referring to a transcendental shift within the psyche. Nowadays it’s more commonly associated with spirituality practices, whether that’s meditation or within psychedelic communities. “It can be associated with an expanding consciousness, a greater appreciation of life from accepting our human frailties, insecurity, vulnerability, uncertainty, and our existential condition as something to embrace rather than cure. It can feel positive, but it can also feel frightening if our sense of self expands without our intention. Is it a breakthrough or a breakdown?”