Andy Warhol once said, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” Given the popularity of social media, YouTube, and other channels, it is easy for people to publish their own creation. In this era, everyone’s ego can be boosted due to the accessibility of different platforms for image building. In fact, the habit of publishing in social media may create an exaggerated sense of self-importance for many people. When we tried to create an ideal image in these social platforms, we may over-identified with the image and attached to who we think we are. This makes us trapped in a self-created prison. One of my clients who frequently made posting in his social media accounts, was very obsessed every day to find some interesting materials for creating a post. Usually, the reason behind him engaging in an interesting activity was to make a posting later. This defeated the purpose of enjoying the present moment in any activity. One day, a fan made a very harsh negative comments in one of his postings. He was very angry and started a war-like dialogue with this fan on the social platform. This impulsive act ruined his reputation in the platform. He regretted afterwards, but many of his fans left the page.
Anger can be associated with different types of human nature. One of those was our tendency to attach to an identity that we cared about so much. For example, it is common for people to become depressed when being laid off and become unemployed, if one attached to one’s professional identity too much. The feeling of anger arose when we felt our self being attacked. In the example above, when my client was being attacked in social media by his fan, his attachment to his ego, actually making him difficult to accept criticism. This strong resistance to face his possible flaws due to his attachment contributed to his intense negative emotions and impulsive behaviors. In fact, in a moderate level, this type of anger is also legitimate to protecting our ego and dignity. This is especially true, when others had malicious intention to assassinate our reputation. However, if our anger was disproportionate to the criticism and we overreacted, this sense of entitlement actually caused us harm and made us imprisoned in the illusionary self- image.
In the face of this competitive world, we inevitably faced all sorts of criticism and attacks in our daily life. If our anger was easily provoked, we would be less capable to sustaining our good work and our presence in our daily activities. To overcome this, we need to go beyond our self, ego. It is important for us to release our self-preoccupation and being less self-obsessed. Learning to focus more on the devotion to build something better for the larger group is one way to go beyond ourselves. For instance, if my client above shifted his focus on creating other more interesting postings and on benefiting the fan’s well-being, this perseverance and striving can overcome preoccupation and attachment to his ego. It is easier to him to focus less on his emotional discomfort due to these attacks and divert his energy to showing kindness and compassion.
Of course, if we face attacks that were malicious and had great impact on our dignity, we need to fight against our rights and protect our reputation. Otherwise, by going beyond our ego, we could attain peace and escape from the prison we created for ourselves.
