Advantage and Ego

(February 19, 2012)

The notions of “advantage” and “ego” have never been so clear to me as they are now. The plan that I hatched and impulsively set in motion around the new year seems to be having its anticipated effect. Only one month has passed in our common reckoning of time, yet these days and weeks have felt much longer to me than the days and weeks of months past. Ever since I stumbled upon Tucker Max’s talk at AHS last year, the notion of “testing” one’s diet and lifestyle really grew on me. He described MMA as an “anvil of truth,” and the term truly resonated with me. What I realized at the turn of the year was that “truth” is perhaps that thing which I have been seeking all along. But what is “truth” in this world, really? That’s likely another essay in itself, but let me propose one simple perspective: it’s what you make out of what you’re given, compared to others. This is the kind of truth that becomes apparent when your being fully engages another being, pitting mind against mind, body against body.

It was not too long ago in the scheme of human evolution that men of subtle control first subdued men of unbridled aggression and forged on their backs the very first civilizations, later empires. In many societies since, the currency of success has continuously evolved, but it has always taken the shape of some formalized manipulation of resources. Raw physical prowess is of course still rewarded in the form of elite athletics, but for the majority of the population, status has become ever subtler and trickier.

When I first told John of John’s Gym that I’d like to start training BJJ, he asked me if I had ever done anything like it before. I told him that I couldn’t submit a pillow if I tried and that I had never been in a fight, and he said two things to me. First, that my inexperience would be an advantage because I wouldn’t have the baggage of bad habits or a bruised ego, but also that I would be very disadvantaged for the same reasons. I told him that I had checked my ego not at the gym’s front-doors, but actually at my apartment before I even left. I thought, however, that I understood “advantage.”

Ego became interesting to me in this context. Now, I must admit that I haven’t studied the topic formally, so I may be clumsily trying to express concepts for which there are real names and well-defined connotations, but I wonder if the conscious suppression of ego is even possible. Almost everything I’ve done in life so far has fed my ego in some way, or I would not have done it otherwise. These are things that when I tried them for the first time, determined myself to have displayed some talent and therefore kept at it. That confidence—undoubtedly some form of ego—is what propelled me forwards in a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. But never have I purposely attempted something that I knew I would be disadvantaged at, or somehow not secretly advantaged at. In my current training, I started believing that I would soon stun everyone with some form of precociousness as I’ve frequently had, yet it’s become clear to me over the past month that I bear no secret advantages. And this feeling is very unfamiliar.

Recently, I’ve been wondering whether I’m actually failing at life—it’s a reasonable question to ask of yourself when life suddenly stops being measured out of 100 or 4.0 and you are instead thrown into the dreaded world of open-ended responses and arbitrary judgment. The devil’s advocate might argue that this is an unconscionable position to take for someone with an Ivy League education getting paid $x—no, $X—at a sweet corporate job straight out of school, rolling onto the streets in his 2012 Volvo C30 or onto the water with his pro windsurfing gear. And I would agree if it weren’t for one thing: I believe I would be asking the exact same question even if I didn’t have any of those things, which legitimizes the concern.

Look at it this way: maybe it’s because I have been so undeservedly privileged that I don’t know if I’m failing at life. And that needs to be remedied, does it not? And so I went searching for a more primal sense of failure to help me understand. Not the kind of fluffy failure like missing a deadline or getting a B in a class, or some other fabrication of a rat-race society, but more like the kind of failure that arises out of complete, utter, and absolute defeat by someone else in combat. And perhaps this someone else, when viewed by society, would not have been considered nearly as successful or privileged as you are. It makes you wonder what these societal badges of honor really mean in the face of an inability to protect one’s life or the integrity of one’s body during conflict. Boundaries and pretense melt away in the face of this truth.

I started BJJ because I wanted to test what my advantages were (diet, genetics, intelligence, etc.), and have found none thus far. All the advantages I’m used to are gone. Intelligence matters little when the gap in experience is large. Quickness matters little when you do not understand control. Diet matters little when your opponents are much larger. These were my first lessons in advantage—or more accurately, disadvantage. But I’m stuck because I’m not sure what role ego has to play here. Does it stay shut off, biding its time, or does it harness frustration and disappointment, fueling progress?

I am tempted to seek out another white belt who is my size and “test” myself that way, but what would that mean? It would mean that I have felt the need to feed my ego, the need to feel advantaged again. So what does that say in turn about my attitude towards life in general? I think it means that there is a tremendous fear of failure and falling behind; it certainly might explain the constant quarter-life crisis I’ve been experiencing since fall of 2010. Yet my bet is that understanding and becoming familiar with failure in this primal way is the key to being able to identify it in my life as a member of a society designed to make dissatisfaction and unhappiness as nebulous as possible. It is the purple pill, if you will: you do not truly escape the matrix, but you gain the ability to sense that it’s sucking you in.