Chronicles of the Bloated Ego: How to Become Master of the Universe and Accidentally Sign Up as Its Janitor

Humans are touching and pathetic creatures. The moment fate hands someone a little extra cash, a couple of obedient underlings, or the delusion that they can bend spoons with their mind and command astral hamsters, a triumphant fanfare blares inside their poor skull: “Mom, I’m the chosen one!”

From that second on, the patient believes they are victoriously soaring toward divine greatness, while actually tumbling head over heels straight into a deep existential ditch.

1. The Trap for the Backyard Demigod

The so-called “dark” side of existence is especially dizzying. Manipulating people, crushing a coworker, grabbing resources, getting back at the neighbor for a loud drill. The effect is instant, drool is dripping, pants feel warm with pride: it feels like you've got the world by the throat. But the real high here doesn't come from actual control, it comes from the sheer sensation of your own supreme importance.

In Indian philosophy, there is an honest diagnosis for this condition: ahamkara (literally “I-maker”). This is when a mortal lump of protoplasm seriously mistakes itself for the isolated center of the universe. And that’s where the trap snaps shut: the poor sap who fancied himself a grand sorcerer or corporate overlord hooks himself up to his own battery. He is forced to feed his own status, bow to infernal “higher-ups” or boards of directors, and shake in terror at who he’ll be if someone takes away his crown. The leash has locked tight, but the collar is encrusted with rhinestones, so our hero couldn't be happier.

2. The Main Dirty Trick of Tyranny

Tough guys usually scoff at the word “service”: “Serve? That’s for losers, peasants, and monks! We are the masters of life here!”

Fifth-grade logic. Let’s turn on the remaining brain cells: if you declare yourself the Master of a patch of land, you automatically sign up to be responsible for it.

• Act like a tyrannical jerk and milk the system purely for your own whims — it will collapse and bury you under a concrete slab.
• Want it to run smoothly — well, better get ready to slave away 24/7.

The efficient king of the hill suddenly discovers he is the most overworked, exhausted employee of his own enterprise, completely forgetting what a weekend looks like. Advanced Roman stoics like Seneca and Marcus Aurelius figured this out two thousand years ago: if you try to privatize every single burp in the cosmos, you inevitably start a permanent war with your own empire. And, if we are to believe the author’s comic hyperbole, that war might very well end with an epic heart attack right on the throne while desperately trying to hold the collapsing perimeter.

3. The Thermodynamics of a Stinking Swamp

The authors of the article suggest stretching strict physics over our sinful meat sacks—purely for the sake of a poetic and merciless analogy. In classical thermodynamics, the second law states that an isolated system inevitably marches toward maximum entropy, meaning “heat death” and a bleak, gray stagnation. Schrödinger and Prigogine proved that a living organism only keeps its act together because an open stream of matter and energy is whistling right through it.

Translating this physical model to the human ego, the authors paint a vivid metaphor (though it obviously won’t qualify for a medical PhD dissertation): a hoarder who has hermetically sealed himself off turns into a tightly canned jar of day-before-yesterday’s borsch. Trying to wall off the universe and simply hoard resources inside his precious “self,” the character begins to quietly sour and ferment from within. No accumulated treasures or mental gymnastics can save a closed can from an existential lid-pop.

4. On Hands, Tantric Etiquette, and Western Fast Food

Occultists love high-flown fairy tales about the “Right-Hand Path” and the “Left-Hand Path”.

• How it’s intended in the East: In Indian tantra, both hands lead to the exact same goal—liberation from the ego-prison (ahamkara). The “right-handers” go through asceticism and restraint, while the “left-handers” head to cremation grounds, consume forbidden things, and break taboos to burn away duality through shock therapy. No villainy for the sake of villainy, just an extreme mind-blowing for spiritual freedom.
• How it’s distorted in the West: The Western consumer took the “left path” as a license for total stinginess: “I am my own little god, now give me anti-greed pills and give them to me double!” The vector points strictly inward, toward grab-bag mode. But the ego’s capacity has a very strict volume limit. When you try to pour a high-voltage cistern into a seven-ounce faceted glass of your own personality, the glass shatters to hell. You are left locked in a burning room, one-on-one with your bottomless, starving maw.

5. The Art of Being a Plumbing Pipe

The “right vector” in a sane reading isn't the role of a bullied doormat handing over their last pants. It’s the author’s imagery of the Conductor. You simply stop playing a concrete dam and start operating as an open plumbing pipe. The authors' point is that interacting with the environment is more productive than hoarding, though the figurative “expansion of the pipe” under pressure is philosophical poetry, not a page out of hydrodynamics guaranteeing an automatic superpower upgrade.

The Zen parable of the ten ox-herding pictures illustrates this exact dynamic. The true finale of enlightenment is by no means eternal floating with a blissful face in a vacuum. In the tenth picture, a dude with a bulging sack of gifts and a wide smile strolls right back to the noisy marketplace, straight into the thick of a screaming crowd. He doesn't sit on a pile of gold; he circulates through the world like the Daoist water from chapter 81 of the Dao De Jing: he settles in the lowest places, doesn’t fight anyone for the throne, yet quietly wears down any granite monoliths.

6. Seven Roads to the Same Shovel

When the authors of the article compare motifs from various philosophical schools, they are tapping into a shared vein, not formulating an immutable law of physics or absolute truth. But the picture turns out amusing: different traditions, regardless of whether they crossed paths in history’s alleys or not, arrive at similar conceptual nodes.

• Christianity: Here, this trick is called kenosis—voluntary self-emptying. Christ, being a rather high-ranking figure, strips away his royal authority and takes the form of a servant, while the Gospels completely flip the pyramid: if you want to be the boss, go wash your comrades' feet. Thomas Aquinas explicitly clarified that pride (superbia) is not just a childish prank, but a stupid refusal to submit one’s micro-“self” to the greater order.
• Sufism: The path goes through fana—the fading of the ego in God—to baqa, abiding in God after that fading. Nobody wipes out the personality to zero here; it’s simply scrubbed clean of the lower self's crown, returning the person to the world as an instrument of God's purpose through khidmat—honest and active service.
• Kabbalah: The desire to rake everything exclusively to oneself generates a spiritual heartburn known as “the bread of shame”. The phase-shifting task is to flip the switch to “receiving in order to bestow,” transforming oneself from a greedy barrel into a normal flow-through vessel. And the very creation of the world according to Lurianic Kabbalah began with tzimtzum—the Creator first sucked in His stomach and voluntarily contracted to make space for existence, setting an example even for the Supreme Power.

The authors bring these plots together not to declare them a single law of nature, but to show that in every corner of culture, people sooner or later realize one thing: blowing up your ego to the size of the universe is a guaranteed way to burst with maximum disgrace.

7. What Psychology Knows About This

This is where grandpa Jung kicks the door open—a psychologist from the last century who spent his entire life rummaging through other people’s heads just to avoid dealing with his own. In his framing, the ego is the center of consciousness, while the Self is the wholeness of the entire psyche. That’s his own personal model, not an automatic clinical diagnosis, and certainly not empirical proof of all world religions. But when the driver starts hallucinating that he owns the entire fleet and the Self along with it, what follows is an absolute, clinical disaster and an ego swollen to the size of a planet. The cure is called "individuation"—a process where your dumb ego isn't smashed against the wall with an axe, but politely sent off on an internship to serve a higher order. A century earlier, Schopenhauer pointed out the exact same thing: all our suffering stems from the illusion of separateness, and liberation comes through compassion and blurring that boundary, so we stop clinging to our uniqueness like an old lady to a grocery coupon.

8. The Ego Isn't an Enemy, It's an Organ

Calm down, drama queens, suicide in the name of enlightenment is canceled. Nobody is asking you to carve out your "self" with a rusty spoon. The ego isn't a cancerous tumor; it’s a functional organ, like your liver or your eyes: without it, you couldn’t even find your way to the bathroom, getting lost in plain sight. The problem isn’t the organ itself, but when this two-bit GPS starts screaming at the ship’s captain, trying to steer a luxury liner straight into the toilet. Maturity is when the ego stops imagining it’s the center of the universe and quietly does its job, remembering to pay its taxes on time.

9. Action Without Ownership

A reasonable question comes up: if we aren't the center of the universe, does that mean action equals inaction, and we should just lie down in a corner and rot in peace? Not a chance in hell. The Bhagavad Gita teaches: you have the right to action, but never to its fruits. That’s neither giving up on work nor an obligation to bust your back doing double shifts. It’s like a surgeon cutting into a patient with a clear conscience, but without screaming after every successful operation, "I am the God of Medicine!". You do the job at your absolute maximum, but you don't try on the winner's laurels—your hands work, but the crown never slips off your head, because it was never there to begin with. The Daoists called this wu wei—action without forcing against the nature of things, minus the pretentious quotes from self-help pages.

10. Crisis or Growing Up

The transition from an obnoxious jerk into an adequate conduit happens either through conscious maturation or a solid rake smacked straight into your forehead. The second option is everyone's favorite national pastime: the ego won’t give up its crown voluntarily, so it gets blindsided by a heart attack, a divorce, or a sudden knock from the bailiffs. Mystics call this the "dark night of the soul," and no, that’s not a medical diagnosis. What’s more, such a crisis can easily break a person to pieces, rather than teach them any lesson at all. You can also get smarter gradually: catching the moments when the crown starts squeezing your skull, slowly loosening control, and acknowledging what others bring to the table. Pulling this off without a catastrophe and a nuclear explosion in your personal life is entirely possible—finally quitting the act of pretending to be Napoleon.

11. An Appendix or a Higher-Order Organ

Time for harsh metaphors for those who still haven't figured it out. Either you become a decent conduit of energy and part of a larger system, or you turn into an appendix. This is purely an authorial metaphor for isolation, not a judgment of human worth, and definitely not a call to physically eliminate anyone. The system tolerates autonomy only as long as it doesn’t cause harm; after that, the isolated organ gets cut the hell out for basic systemic hygiene. And believe me, the architecture of this reality doesn't give a damn about your delicate existential angst. It’s not a literal law of nature, but things here operate with nearly the same indifference as thermodynamics, not by the rules of your fragile self-esteem.

12. The Wall You Mistook for Yourself

And here is the grand finale of this cynical parade. The root problem of your pathetic life isn’t Putin, your boss, or your mother-in-law; it’s that blind concrete wall you built around your precious "I" and defend at the expense of your own sanity. That armor does a great job keeping the outside world at bay, but it acts like a concrete ceiling your miserable energy can never jump past. Tear that wall down voluntarily, or wait until it collapses right on top of you under the sheer weight of your own egoism. The choice is yours: stay walled up inside your own delusions, or finally exhale and quit pretending to be the navel of the universe.