Beyond the Persona: Unmasking the Cost of Ego

This morning, August 21, 2023, I woke up thinking about a friend of mine. I met him at UCLA. He would read some of my writings and call and talk to me about them. We only talked over the phone but did not meet in person. Since he initiated the contact, I was surprised that a year later we had not met. He had not called to meet me, to know me as a person. I wanted to see what he was like, so, I called him, and we met at the students’ union building.

He was an older man, perhaps forty or more years old, I was a graduate student, in my twenties. Thus, ordinarily, there would be no basis for our relationship. After graduate school and leaving town, I had a little party in my apartment. I invited him and he came. Thereafter, I left town.

At no time did he invite me to his apartment.

From out of state, we, occasionally, talked over the phone. Once he was complaining about how much it cost him to pay the typists that typed his papers for him, and I asked him why he does not learn to type. What is the big deal about typing, why pay for something that you can easily do by yourself?

Considering the thousands of dollars, he is paying his typists, I pitied him. I told him to write his stuff in hand and send it to me to type for him. I type rather fast and can type five or more pages in an hour. So, the man would write his stuff and mail it to me and I would type it for him. I did not ask him to pay me. I just functioned as his free typist, and it did not occur to him to pay me.

At some point, I was too busy to type his material for him; I told him so and stopped typing for him. A few years later, I visited Los Angeles and called him up. We met at a fancy seaside restaurant in Manhattan Beach; since I invited him, I paid for it. I was in the LA area for a month and the man did not invite me to his apartment. I thought that that was odd.

I asked around and folks told me that no one knew where he lived, that he did not invite anyone to his apartment.

I looked up his address on the white pages (Telephone book). He lived in Santa Monica, California. I drove by his address. It was a gated bunch of expensive-looking apartments. The man drove a Jaguar car. So, why did he not invite folks to his place? It could not be because of poverty that he is ashamed that people would see it if they came to his digs. The man was never married and did not have children.

I decided to do some psychoanalysis of him. When I called him, I deliberately asked him some questions meant to understand him.

It turned out that the man is very egotistical and wanted to seem a very important person and felt that he ought to relate to people from afar because if they came close to him, they would find out that he is not the big stuff he pretends to be. Keeping people away was designed to maintain his desired important self.

In all the years I knew him, he had one lady friend; they arranged to see each other on weekends but otherwise, stayed apart from each other.

(Diagnostically, I ruled out avoidant personality disorder for him.)

So, to maintain the chimera of existential importance, this man cut himself off from other people and lived alone; he only saw people, if at all, at neutral places.

Interesting creatures these animals called human beings! The ego can imprison you. In trying to seem important in other people's eyes, and prevent them from rejecting you, your ego can cut you off from relating to other people.

A few years ago, I called his phone number, and no one picked it up. I called several times and still no one picked up. I called a friend in the LA area and gave him the man’s phone number and address and asked him to do a welfare check and see if he was okay. He did. He knocked on his door and no one answered, so he went to the apartment manager and the lady told him that Dr. Mike O (as he was called by people) was dead. She told him the circumstances of his death.

He died in his apartment and after days of not seeing him come and go or move his car, she called the police who did a welfare check and found his dead body on the floor of his kitchen. She said that she did not know of any relative or friend of the man to call and report his death. The county of Los Angeles took his body to the mortuary and since no one claimed it, after a period they buried him where such people are buried.

And the man had relatives in the LA area but none of them knew where he lived or related to him. He minded his business and other people minded their business.

The man lived alone, a prisoner of his ego’s desire to maintain the persona of being a very important person which he believed that if other people came close to him that they would see is a hoax and not respect and accept him.

So, why did he, and why do human beings desire to seem important when all we need to do is accept that we are unimportant and that we are nothing and not pretend to be some make-believe important person? I do not know.