Last Notes
Ego Death Builds A new Ego
Ego death has become something people pursue. There are retreats built around it, ceremonies that promise it, and a steady supply of writing about how to get there. The implied arc is that the ego is a problem, the problem can be solved, and solving it produces a person who sees clearly and wants little. I think the whole arc is aimed at the wrong thing, because the ego was never the trouble.
The ego is the function that holds a person together well enough to act. It keeps a continuous story running so you can make a decision today that still makes sense tomorrow, remember what you value under pressure, and move through a day without re-deriving your entire position on everything. Strip that out and what you have is someone who cannot function, which is a condition we already have names for and do not generally recommend. What causes trouble is narrower. The ego gets the final say on everything, including questions where it has no business being the authority, and the available fix for that is demotion.
It's worth looking at what happens in the one setting where any of this gets measured. In 2015, Lebedev and colleagues scanned fifteen people who received psilocybin intravenously and reported their degree of ego dissolution. What they found was a loss of integration. Communication between the medial temporal lobe and higher cortical regions dropped, the salience network came apart, and coordination between the hemispheres fell. The salience network is the thing that decides what in your environment gets flagged as worth your attention, so when it disintegrates, the ordinary business of sorting the world into relevant and irrelevant stops happening.
In plain terms, the machinery that assembles a coherent self from moment to moment stopped coordinating. The self stayed where it was. What paused was the stitching.
That's a small study, and measuring something this subjective is difficult, so hold the specifics loosely. The shape of the finding matters more than the numbers. What dissolves is an integration, and integrations reassemble. Everyone in that scanner was themselves again a few hours later, which tells you the main thing worth knowing about ego death. It's a state. Whatever happened, it ended, and the person it happened to went back to having preferences and opinions and a sense of being someone in particular.
The harder claim, and the one I'd defend most strongly, is that when the real version happens, nobody chose it. It arrives through a diagnosis, a bankruptcy, a marriage ending, a career that stops existing, a public failure that cannot be explained away. It shows up when the story you had been running about who you are stops being able to account for what is actually happening, and you cannot get the story working again no matter how hard you push. That is an event, and it happens to you.
The pursued version is a different thing wearing the same name. A ceremony is a controlled encounter with dissolution that comes with a return ticket, a facilitator, and a scheduled end time. People get real things from it and I am not dismissing that. But the knowledge that you'll be back by Sunday does most of the work of making it survivable, and that knowledge is exactly what the involuntary version withholds.
This connects to something I argued in the book and still believe. Constraint reveals character rather than building it. Pressure removes the room a person had to perform in, and what's underneath becomes visible, to them most of all. Involuntary ego death is that taken to its limit, which is what happens when the room disappears entirely and there's nothing left to perform for. You cannot want this, and if you're seeking it, you're almost certainly not in it.
So what actually dies. The self survives, still preferring coffee to tea, still annoyed by the same people. What ends is a specific story, the version of yourself you had been defending, the account of who you are that your decisions were arranged around. People describe this as losing themselves and I understand why, because from the inside the story and the self aren't distinguishable, which is the whole problem the book is about. What goes is narrower than it feels. It was a narrative, it was always a construction, and its collapse feels like annihilation because you had never located yourself anywhere outside it.
Then comes the part almost nobody mentions. A new story assembles immediately, within weeks and sometimes days. The machinery that built the first one is still fully operational and it doesn't sit idle waiting for permission. It takes the most salient material available, which is now the collapse itself, and it builds.
The new identity is a person who lost everything and came through it, who has seen what matters, who is no longer fooled by the things that fool everyone else. That identity has the same properties as the one it replaced. It confers standing, it would cost something to give up, and it generates its own defensive reflexes, which are harder to examine than the originals because examining them looks like doubting hard-won wisdom rather than questioning a position. It's also why people who have been through genuine ego death are so frequently insufferable about it. That's the machine doing the thing the machine does, with better raw material than it usually gets.
None of which means nothing happened. Something did, and it can matter enormously. What changes is that you watched the story come apart and reassemble, and you were present for the assembly. You saw the seams. A person who has seen their own story get built has a harder time believing the next one arrived from somewhere outside of them, which is a smaller claim than enlightenment and the one that survives.
So the available thing is demotion. The ego keeps running, because you need it running, and it keeps producing verdicts. What changes is whether its verdict is final, whether there's a gap between the reaction and the ruling, and whether anything else gets to speak in that gap. That doesn't require a ceremony or a catastrophe. It requires noticing, repeatedly, that the voice insisting it knows is the same voice that has been wrong before, and declining to give it the last word on this particular occasion.
It also doesn't stay done. It has to be done again tomorrow, and the day after, and it never produces a person who has finished, which is probably why nobody sells retreats for it.
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Shadow Work Has a Shadow
Somewhere in the last decade, shadow work stopped being a thing people did and became a thing people announce. It has the shape of a genre now. There are prompts and worksheets. There are people who describe themselves as being in their shadow era. There are threads that open with "I've been doing a lot of shadow work lately" and proceed to a list of the author's darker traits, each one selected with care, each one somehow more interesting than embarrassing. There is a vocabulary, and the vocabulary is most often deployed at other people. That's your shadow talking.
What all of this has in common is that it is legible from the outside. It can be posted. And that alone should make a person suspicious, because the concept it borrows from was built to describe the part of us that resists exactly that kind of visibility.
Jung's formulation is less elaborate than its popular descendants. Everyone carries a version of themselves they are willing to look at, and everyone leaves things out of it. The leftovers do not evaporate. They remain operative, and they exert pressure from outside awareness. In the lectures collected as Psychology and Religion he puts it plainly: everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. He treats it at length in Aion, where the shadow is a moral problem implicating the whole personality rather than a catalogue of traits to be enumerated.
The part the genre has almost entirely dropped is the method. Jung did not think you could find your shadow by looking inward and making an inventory. His route to it ran through projection. You locate the shadow in what you cannot stand in other people, in the reaction that arrives too fast and runs hotter than the situation warrants. The irritation is the instrument. The contents of your own self-assessment are not, because the material in question is precisely the material your self-assessment has already declined to include. This is not a small detail. It is the whole procedure, and the popular version has inverted it.
The inversion matters because of what introspection turns out to be good for, which is less than we assume. In 2002 Emily Pronin, Daniel Lin, and Lee Ross described what they called the bias blind spot. Across a sample of more than six hundred Americans, over eighty-five percent rated themselves as less biased than the average American, and exactly one person rated themselves as more biased than average.
Three follow-on findings make this worse rather than better. Being told about the bias does not fix it: in later work by Pronin and Kugler, subjects who had the phenomenon explained to them went on to rate themselves as less susceptible than others anyway, so knowing the name of the thing did not move the estimate. Decision-making ability does not predict immunity either, since people who scored higher on measures of decision-making competence were no less likely to show the blind spot. And the mechanism is the one that should concern anyone writing shadow-work prompts, because people who look inward for evidence of their own bias come away misled. The processes they are looking for do not operate anywhere conscious attention can reach. Introspection returns a clean report, and the clean report is not evidence of cleanliness. It is evidence that introspection cannot see this.
Which is an experimental restatement of the thing Jung was describing. The shadow is defined by its unavailability to the inward glance, so a practice built on the inward glance will find, reliably, whatever the inward glance was going to find anyway.
From there the failure modes follow in a kind of order. The first is announcement. To say you are doing shadow work is to claim acquaintance with something defined by your not having it, and the claim may be sincere while remaining structurally strange, in roughly the way that describing yourself as humble is structurally strange. Whatever you have located and are now discussing has, by the act of locating and discussing it, moved into the part of you that is admitted.
The second is inventory. The genre's characteristic output is a list of one's own darker traits, but the traits available for listing are the ones already integrated enough to be named. Genuinely unintegrated material does not show up as an item on a list. It shows up as a reaction you would defend as reasonable.
The third is selection, which operates even within the admitted material. The traits that make the cut tend to be the interesting ones. Intensity. Impatience with fools. A certain ruthlessness. These read as complicated rather than unflattering, and crucially they do not cost the author anything. The traits that would cost something stay off the list, which is how you can tell the list is not the work.
The fourth is weaponization. The most common use of shadow language in public is diagnostic and aimed outward: that's your shadow, you're projecting. Deployed that way the concept becomes a method for dismissing an objection without engaging it, and it works unusually well because it is unfalsifiable. Denial confirms it.
The fifth is completion. The genre has an arc in which you do the work, you integrate, and you emerge. This is narratively satisfying and it is not what Jung described. He was clear that the shadow cannot be eliminated, only related to, and there is no terminal state in which a person is finished.
All of which brings up the thing the genre has produced that is worth naming on its own. A person who has done shadow work, publicly, acquires an identity, and the identity is this: someone who examines himself. Someone not fooled by his own story. Someone more self-aware than his interlocutors, and demonstrably so, because he has been willing to say unflattering things about himself where people can see.
That identity has the same properties as any other. It confers standing. It would cost something to lose. It generates its own defensive reflexes, and those reflexes are harder to examine than the ones that preceded them, because examining them threatens the very thing that was supposed to be the product of examination. So the practice produces a new shadow, located in the persona of the person who has addressed his shadow, and this one has better cover than the original because it is wearing the costume of the solution.
The strongest case against everything I have written here deserves stating properly, because it is not a weak case. Most people are never going to read Aion. A worksheet that gets someone to write down one thing they dislike about themselves is doing more than the nothing that was happening before, and some fraction of those people will go further on their own. Degraded transmission is still transmission, and a concept that reaches a million people in simplified form may do more good in aggregate than one that reaches a thousand intact. There is also something faintly contemptible about criticizing people for attempting self-examination badly, particularly when the criticism comes from someone whose own attempts are not available for inspection.
I think most of that is correct, and I do not think it rescues the practice, for a reason that has to do with what failure looks like here. A person who never attempts any of this retains an accurate sense of not having done it. A person who completes the exercise acquires the sense of having examined himself, and the research says that sense is uncorrelated with whether anything was actually found. So the failure mode is not zero progress. It is confident false progress, which is worse than none, because it closes the question. Having done the work, there is nothing further to look for, and the next disproportionate reaction that arrives gets filed as information about the other person rather than as data about yourself. The practice that was supposed to make you slower to judge has instead issued you a certificate.
None of this is an argument against the concept. The concept is sound and the mechanism it describes is real. It is an argument that the popular practice is constructed in a way that cannot reach it, that the practice reliably produces a secondary benefit in the appearance of depth, and that the secondary benefit is probably doing most of the work.
The honest version is not a genre, because it does not produce anything postable. It runs on what Jung actually pointed at. You get irritated by someone, and the irritation is disproportionate, or it arrives before you have evaluated anything, or it persists after the stimulus is gone. That reaction is the only reliable signal available, because it originates outside the part of you that curates. Then you ask what the reaction was protecting, the answer is almost never intellectual, and you do not get a certificate.
It has no arc. It does not conclude. Nothing about it demonstrates to anyone that you are a serious person. And the most reliable sign that it is happening is not that someone is talking about doing it. It is that a person has become slightly slower to be certain about other people's motives, which is the single hardest change to make and the easiest one to miss.
Brett Hansen is author of The Belief Machine. Find more at Thebeliefmachine.org
😌🫶🤓
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Chequea el reportaje sobre nuestra historia en @holanewsclt
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Afterglow captures a quiet moment suspended between delicacy and light. The piece is less about symbolism than atmosphere. It explores contrast, fragility, and the way something enduring can exist inside something fleeting.
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A sleeping newborn and page 53. Best thing I've seen all week. Thank you for sharing.
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Travis, this is a beautiful picture. Firstly, congratulations on the new addition to your family!
You thanked me for sharing the book with the world. I'd say the same to you for this. Someone reading something I made, with his kid asleep on him, is about the best thing that can happen to a book 🤝
Always happy to discuss.