I've been watching Halt and Catch Fire again. For a nerd like me, who grew up in this era, it's pure catnip: the development of PCs, the history of the Internet and a bunch of 80's electro-pop, oh my!
All with a stellar cast, wrapped in a compelling drama. It's awesome.
🤓 💻 🎹 😍
One of the characters, Cameron, has a complicated past. Much has been collected in that Thought System 📦 of hers, and for most of the programme, she takes what's in there pretty seriously.
(Give her a break – it's innocent, and she's human, after all. Who here hasn't taken their thinking too seriously from time to time, I wonder…? Me included.)
🤔
Thought not.
And because behaviour follows our relationship to thought, this means that for most of the programme, she exhibits some fairly self-destructive tendencies.
Ego's running the show, it's going completely unquestioned, and it's rampaging through her life.
It makes for great drama, worthy of a TV show!
[Mild spoilers follow]
Until she takes a job offer to live on the other side of the world, immerses herself in an entirely different culture, and—experientially—comes to the following conclusion:
“You go through life and you have this idea of who you are and what you do and then you discover it’s total bull$h!t. It’s a defence mechanism. And once you stop defending your self you can be all these other things…”
And I have taken the liberty of slowing down the word ‘yourself’ to a more truthful ‘your self’ there, because that's what she's talking about here: ‘self’ (with a small ‘s’) – that collection of other people's opinions, stale memories and left brain objects, that is surmised (by that same mind) as being an actual thing.
It looks like it's a real entity (an id-entity! 😮) which means of course it needs protecting at all costs. I mean, why wouldn't it, if it's alive? Everything that's alive wants to stay alive, doesn't it?
But protecting that thought-created ego construct 📦 is exhausting, and in doing so we inadvertently place artificial limits on our lives, for example:
- Working beyond breaking point, because we're innocently protecting a ‘high achiever’ identity
- Sacrificing our authentic desires as we unwittingly protect a ‘people-pleasing’ identity
- Watching the list of things we feel we can do slowly shrink, as we innocently defend a ‘mental health problem’ identity
- Experiencing conflict in our relationships as we helplessly defend a ‘being right’ identity…
…and the list goes on (and on and on – there's really no limit to ego identities).
You'll have your own, if you slow down for a moment and consider this question:
What identity are you busy protecting?
(Give yourself a break – it's innocent, and you're human after all.)
Now consider what artificial limits that Ego Construct 📦 is placing on your life…?
🤔
Finally, what would happen if you stopped defending that story-version of your self?
What other things would you get to be?
💖
Giles
p.s. Halt and Catch Fire is worth it for the title sequence alone. If this 31 seconds of Trentemøller-crafted pumping electro theme tune doesn't set your pulse racing, then maybe the series is not for you:
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Giles P Croft
Don't try and ditch your Ego Construct 📦 – celebrate its nonsense! 🥳