When people are asked who they are, often times they respond with information pertaining to their profession and social status: “I’m an engineer living in the suburbs”. The society we live in trains us each day to feed our egos with these external tokens of success, fooling us into thinking that it will make us happy. But as recent positive psychology research shows (and some old wisdom traditions have preached for thousands of years), the ego is only a protection layer used to hide and protect one’s true identity. Being self-important only makes you unhappy and less important to others.
So how does one peel off that external mask that’s been built and nurtured for years without going through years of therapy dealing with that accumulated self-luggage? By replacing it with a new external identity that calls for no social recognition of importance. A guy on a bike is always just a guy on a bike. Like Billy Joel says “when you put a helmet on, you become anonymous-you’re just another maniac on a bike. To be honest, that’s very refreshing.” 🙂
