Things get eliminated once they have surpassed their usefulness. You’ll hear a lot of talk on releasing the ego as soon as possible in order to rise to a higher more conscious and interconnected version of yourself, but this may not be the best way. Before you’re fully formed as a person you need the ego as a sidekick to understand and grasp the world in low resolution, like a good once over that will sharpen and get more high-res as you go along and accumulate experiences.

Ego has its purpose in young people. It needs to be there to an extent to help them find their place. The only thing it wants is to keep you alive and functioning and, if it doesn’t get blown into delusions of self-grandeur, is a very useful tool since the first part of your lives are about accumulating and the second part is about editing. When accumulating, ego is a friend because it acts as a motivational ghost within a machine that is ever hungry and cannot be satisfied. Mind you, this gluttony has a backlash of never feeling truly fulfilled because for the ego there is no such thing as “enough”, although it helps you get to the primary directive of youth – in somewhat stumbling and unrefined ways, but still it is working for you and not against you.

As you move from the need to be the center of attention and from wanting to be interesting into being interested in things, you realize that holding on to the ego is preventing you from ever getting to the place of gratitude which softens the existence and marks the entrance into the second part of life where the self is dissolved into a different entity that no longer sees everything around it as competition but feels connected. This is a place to kill the ego, let go of a limiting identity and mindsets and focus on something deeper, cleaner and more essential. Here you fully accept all of your responsibilities without blaming anyone else to protect the ego that can’t admit that the mistake was its own. You don’t become a grown up once you are old enough to drink in a bar or drive a car. You grow up once the dissolution of ego takes place, which can happen decades down the road from your “official grown up-ness”.

There is a curve of happiness noticed cross culturally and not correlated to wealth, sex or living conditions. It is shaped like a U-curve: Your happiness starts to decline around 25 – this is when the ego starts to loose it’s previous benefits; Than, if you don’t figure this out soon, you get on a downwards spiral that hits rock bottom of the U curve in your 40-s and once you intuitively figure out that more connection is better, that being is more important than being right, that self that struggles for its own gain is an illusionary point of view, the curve starts rapidly going up and, if there are no catastrophic diseases in your upcoming decades, each one is happier than the previous culminating in the 80’s (where women are happier than men, but we won’t go into the reasons for this now).

The process doesn’t need to be this messy, the curve of the U can be far less of a plunging descent and the transition can be significantly eased by any practice that makes you change your awareness, go outside the prison of your own head and make you understand and feel the true nature of all things being one. You can get to the same place of liberation by multiple ways and meditation, LSD micro dosing, ayuhuasca, breathing exercises, yoga, reading and learning about various spiritual or philosophical practices are all equally valid. Say thank you to your ego, you needed it at some point, and then kill it in gratitude and without malice.