The Less Self-Important You Are, the Better Your Life Will Be
Boulevard Haussmann, Avenue Foch, Rue du Dr. Lancereaux, Avenue Paul Doumer, Rue Théodule Ribot, Avenue Kléber, Boulevard Raspail—all the names of large Parisian streets. But who knows these days whom they were named after? Try to guess who those people were.
All major figures of their era, no doubt—city planners, generals, scientists. A dinner invitation from Georges-Eugène Haussmann, for instance, would have thrilled his contemporaries.
And today? Today you step out of the Galeries Lafayette onto the Boulevard Haussmann without a second thought, shopping bags full of things you don’t need dangling from the crook of your arm. It’s summer, the air shimmers like fluid glass above the boulevard, and your vanilla ice cream drips onto your T-shirt and Bermuda shorts. Your fingers are sticky, and you’re annoyed at the throng of tourists, even though you’re a tourist yourself. Mostly, however, it’s the aggressive, whooshing traffic that gets on your nerves, rushing over the paving stones of the venerable city planner, whose name means nothing to you. Haussmann—who? He’s already been consumed by the dust mites of history.
If the expiry date of such important figures as Haussmann, Foch or Raspail extends only four generations or so, then even the colossal names of the present day will have faded in a few more. In a hundred or two hundred years at the most, hardly anybody will know who Bill Gates, Donald Trump or Angela Merkel were. And as for the two of us—you, dear reader, and me—a few decades after we’re gone nobody will spare us a second thought.
Imagine two hypothetical types of people: A and B. Type A individuals possess boundless self-esteem. Type B individuals, on the other hand, possess very little. When somebody steals their food, challenges them for their cave or runs off with their mate, the Bs react passively. That’s just life, they say. I’ll find more food, another cave, a different mate. Type As react in the opposite manner, flying off the handle and vehemently defending their possessions. Which type of person has a better chance of passing on their genes to the next generation? A, of course. It’s impossible to live without a certain degree of ego. Try going a single day without using the words “I” or “mine.” I tried it, and failed miserably. Simply put, we’re Type A.
The problem here is that the sense of self-esteem we’ve inherited from our Type-A ancestors is so sensitive that it messes things up for us. We explode at the tiniest affronts, even if they’re minuscule in comparison to Stone Age threats—we’re not praised enough, our attempts to impress aren’t met with a suitable response, we’re not invited to something. In most cases, other people turn out to be right: we’re not as significant as we think.
I recommend viewing your own importance from the perspective of the next century—from a point when your good name will have dwindled to a zero, no matter how fabulous you might be today. A fundamental part of the good life is not being too full of yourself. In fact, there’s an inverse correlation: the less you stand upon your ego, the better your life will be. Why? Three reasons.
One: self-importance requires energy. If you think overly highly of yourself, you have to operate a transmitter and a radar simultaneously. On the one hand, you’re broadcasting your self-image out into the world; on the other, you’re permanently registering how your environment responds. Save yourself the effort. Switch off your transmitter and your radar, and focus on your work. In concrete terms, this means don’t be vain, don’t name-drop, and don’t brag about your amazing successes. I don’t care if you’ve just had a private audience with the Pope—be pleased about it, sure, but don’t put up the photographs in your apartment. If you’re a millionaire, don’t donate money so you can have buildings, professorships or football stadiums named after you. It’s affected. While you’re at it, why not take out TV ads raving about how marvelous you are? At least Haussmann and Co. got their streets for free.
Two: the more self-important you are, the more speedily you’ll fall for the self-serving bias. You’ll start doing things not to achieve a specific goal but to make yourself look good. You often see the self-serving bias among investors. They buy stocks in glamorous hotels or sexy tech companies—not because they’re solid investments but because they want to enhance their own image. On top of this, people who think highly of themselves tend to systematically overestimate their knowledge and abilities (this is termed overconfidence), leading to grave errors in decision-making.
Three: you’ll make enemies. If you stress your own importance, you do so at the expense of other people’s, because otherwise it would devalue your relative position. Once you’re successful, if not before, other people who are equally full of themselves will shit on you. Not a good life.
As you can see, your ego is more antagonist than friend. This is hardly news, of course. In fact, it’s been the default perspective for 2,500 years. The Stoics, for instance, were always on their guard against overweening self-esteem. A classic example is Marcus Aurelius, who found being a Roman emperor almost unpleasant. By keeping a diary (his Meditations), he forced himself to stay modest—no mean feat when you’re the most powerful person on Earth. Religion, too, provides intellectual tools to keep the ego in check: in many religions, self-esteem is actually considered a manifestation of the Devil. Yet over the last two hundred years our culture has released the brakes on ego, and today everybody seems to be their own little brand manager.
Think about this: every one of us is merely one person among billions. We’re all living inside an infinitesimal sliver of time with a random beginning and a random end. And we have all (the author included) already crammed many stupid things into this brief span. So be glad nobody’s named a street after you—it’d only stress you out. Stay modest. You’ll improve your life by several orders of magnitude. Self-esteem is so easy that anyone can do it; modesty, on the other hand, may be tough, but at least it’s more compatible with reality. And it calms your emotional wave pool.
Self-importance has developed into a malady of civilization. We’ve got our teeth into our egos like a dog into an old shoe. Let the shoe go. It has no nutritional value, and it’ll soon taste rotten.