For a while now, I have been confused about how the term Ego is used in Thinking, Fast and Slow [1] vs its usage in Buddhism/Spirituality. I’ve had a long standing desire to resolve this confusion as a part of my belief in the inevitable confluence of the knowledge contained in Psychology, Neuroscience and Buddhism/Spirituality [2].

Per Wiki on ‘Ego Depletion’, “Ego depletion refers to the idea that self-control or willpower draws upon a limited pool of mental resources that can be used up. When the energy for mental activity is low, self-control is typically impaired, which would be considered a state of ego depletion. A depleting task requiring self-control can have a hindering effect on a subsequent self-control task, even if the tasks are seemingly unrelated.”

I perceive a state of Ego depletion to be one when I feel fatigued or exhausted. Thus I visualized ‘Ego’ as a mental resource that would get depleted when I performed a task that I did not want to do. And replenished when I consumed glucose or slept (there might be more modes described in TFS). If you subscribe to the ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ world view, then optimizing your life for reduction of ‘Ego Depletion’ or ‘Ego Replenishment’ would make sense. In my mind, ‘Ego depletion’, thus had a negative connotation.

My understanding of Ego as it is used in Buddhism/Spirituality is that it’s the sense of Self. It contains a database of your identity traits and a mechanism that’s designed to protect your sense of identity. It generates cravings when you are exposed to events that align favorably with your sense of identity and aversions when you experience events that align unfavorably with your sense of identity. Spiritual practices work on diminishing the Ego and reducing the strength of the reactionary tendencies based in the Ego. The end goal seems to be to act in a manner where there is no sense of Self. No Ego.

This is alluded to in Psychedelic experimentation too as ‘Ego Death’. ‘Ego Death’ is a state supposedly experienced with hallucinogenics where one loses one’s sense of Self. I’ve read descriptions of it about how it feels like the boundaries of your body are disappearing and you flow with everything around you as if you were in a river. Back in the Spiritual land, they say you die twice — once when your Ego dies and once when your body dies. For most of us, these two events coincide. I suspect the idea of ‘seeing a flashback of your life’ before death refers to Ego death. Imagine a process where the Ego ‘trash can’ is emptied. One piece at a time. If you’re from the 90s, you’ll probably remember the visualization Windows 95 had when you clicked ‘Empty Trash Can’ and it deleted one file at a time, each disappearing in a poof.

So the diminishing of Ego seems to have a positive connotation in Spirituality.

There-in lied my confusion. ‘Ego depletion’ is ‘bad’ in TFS. ‘Ego reduction’ is ‘good’ in Spirituality.

This confusion is alluded to, in Wikipedia too-

The word “ego” in “ego depletion” is used in the “psychological” sense rather than the colloquial sense.

I think I’ve resolved this confusion now.

‘Ego depletion’ is not the depletion of the Ego itself. It’s the depleted state of mind that I feel when I have to do things I don’t want to do. How do I decide whether I don’t want to do something? I check if that thing generates an aversion in me. How do I decide that? I do a look-up in the database of my Identity traits and see if that thing is something that I’ve recorded as “not liking”. Now if this database of my Identity traits was non-existent or minimal, i.e. my Ego was diminished, then the look-up would fail and there would be no aversion. And thereby, no propensity to reach that depleted, fatigued state of mind.

In hindsight, I think the term ‘Ego depletion’ is poorly chosen. Because adding ‘depletion’ at the end of the term makes ‘Ego’ seem like a resource. Thinking of ‘Ego’ as a resource makes me want to protect it. I don’t think that should be the goal. I wonder if Daniel Kahnemann and Amos Tversky had a deep spiritual practice when they wrote the book. I’d wager not because if they did, they’d probably pick a different term. I’d also be curious to understand the reasoning behind why they chose this term. [3]

[1] I used ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ as the representative book for Behavioral Psychology

[2] As a side note, I wish there was a better term to describe what I mean by Buddhism/Spirituality

[3] I’ll also admit that this confusion might just be in my head and everyone else in the world knew this already

[4] Like seriously, why didn’t y’all tell me?!! #sharebot r/outoftheloop