David Harbour is the latest celebrity to experience ego death. At least, that was what he said in a recent interview with the Stranger Things star published in GQ. “It’s all just ego,” he told the magazine during a conversation about his own fame. “It seems kind of silly to say this, but the art that I’m creating is about you. It’s not about me. It’s about your experience of life. We get hung up on [the person themselves], and I think we get lost in the idea of, like, what it’s really about. And I think, for me, it’s dangerous, too, to get lost in the personality in any way.”
The 50-year-old actor went on, serving up further word salad: “That’s part of the problem – people believe the hype, they get into the image, they forget that it’s all just… I mean, I’m not the same person I was this morning. It’s all impermanent. It’s all gonna change. It’s all gonna die. And that’s very, very much deeply in my heart now. At 20, [life] was gonna go on forever.”
Harbour might not have referenced the phrase “ego death” himself (it’s in the article’s headline) but frankly, he didn’t need to. Because by now, an ego death is an established part of modern-day parlance. On TikTok, there are myriad videos on the subject, featuring so-called “experts” delivering short, snappy sermons about the importance of undergoing an ego death as some form of spiritual awakening. “When people ask what I’ve been up to but I can’t say I’ve been rewiring my whole nervous system, had an ego death, and unlearning cycles of toxic behaviours so I just say, ‘working a lot’,” reads the caption over one viral clip featuring a man walking alone at sunset with the hashtags: “#relatable” and “#selfcare”.
It’s something celebrities talk about particularly frequently, so much so that it’s one of many punchlines in Apple TV’s critical hit, The Studio, a razor-sharp satire of Hollywood’s movers and shakers. At one point, a famous actress accidentally overdoses on magic mushrooms and must deliver an important speech while talking in tongues. “She’s having an ego death!” one person shouts, successfully ameliorating any concerns.
Going off these slightly ambiguous references, the term “ego death” itself could literally mean anything. It’s having an existential crisis and coming out the other side. It’s having a long conversation with a family member or close friend and feeling changed by it. It’s realising the world doesn’t revolve around you and using that as evidence of spiritual enlightenment. It’s a particularly potent trip on psychedelics. It’s the revival that comes after an anxiety-inducing hangover.
This rhetoric forms part of a long line of pop psychology that has been dominating online discourse for some time now. Therapy-speak has become so widespread on social media that it’s almost impossible to know what any of it means, if anything at all beyond a bid to hack Instagram’s algorithm and go viral.
“Terms like ‘ego death’, ’narcissism’, ’trauma’, and ’triggered’ have all become social media terms that get hollowed out to the point that it is not always clear if they are used in an informed way or thrown around without much meaning at all,” says Dr Greg Madison, an existential psychologist and chartered member of the British Psychological Society. The first thing people are getting wrong about “ego death” is that it shouldn’t be spoken about as fact. “It is a hypothetical construct,” says Dr Madison, noting that its psychological use originated from Freud, for whom the term originally simply referred to someone’s sense of self.
“It was a pivotal part of his way of conceptualising the dynamics in the human psyche: the pull between our instincts, our conscience and our socialisation,” explains Dr Madison. “The ego tries to keep us rational and functioning according to convention. It wants to keep us out of jail and earning a living. However, in everyday language ‘ego’ has also come to mean grandiosity and the constant need to accumulate esteem to prove our superiority, ironically in order to assure ourselves we are good enough.”
It’s because of this contemporary understanding that has given rise to the concept of the “ego death” aka the constant need for one’s ego to be quashed so as to make space for other, more benevolent, parts of ourselves, like empathy, tolerance and compassion. “An ‘ego death’, therefore, can seem like a liberation from the confines of a too-small and constantly managed sense of identity or freedom from parochial forms of the conventional,” adds Dr Madison.
As for how the ego death became a part of the pop psychology pit, that’s thanks to Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist for whom the term was synonymous with “psychic death”, referring to a transcendental shift within the psyche. Nowadays it’s more commonly associated with spirituality practices, whether that’s meditation or within psychedelic communities. “It can be associated with an expanding consciousness, a greater appreciation of life from accepting our human frailties, insecurity, vulnerability, uncertainty, and our existential condition as something to embrace rather than cure. It can feel positive, but it can also feel frightening if our sense of self expands without our intention. Is it a breakthrough or a breakdown.”
The complicated thing is that there is no single meaning for an ego death. How it’s defined will differ person to person, though many people online seem to be using it as a stamp of honour in some way. “I suspect it has accrued a degree of kudos, ironically ego-death as another accomplishment that ego can claim to assert its standing,” posits Dr Madison.
Harbour has faced cheating allegations since splitting from his wife, musician Lily Allen. Neither he nor Allen have spoken about the rumours but Harbour refused to go into details of the breakup in his GQ interview, telling the publication only: “There’s no use in that form of engaging [with tabloid news] because it’s all based on hysterical hyperbole.”
Harbour went on to allude to the breakdown of his marriage, implying that he was on a spiritual journey. “You know, it’s not that things ending aren’t hard, but it’s just that I’m choosing to make it a period of growth,” he said. “And I feel like having the opportunity to be busy and work is really good, and also to delve into this deeper spiritual quest.”
I suspect it has accrued a degree of kudos, ironically ego-death as another accomplishment that ego can claim to assert its standing
Dr Greg Madison, existential psychologist and chartered member of the British Psychological Society
Several famous men have spoken explicitly about undergoing an ego death after being levelled with allegations of various kinds. Consider Shia LaBeouf, for example, who was accused of sexual battery, assault and infliction of emotional distress in a lawsuit filed by FKA twigs, whom the actor dated for around a year in 2018. At the time the suit was filed, LaBeouf denied many of the allegations but in 2022 told Jon Bernthal on his podcast Real Ones: “I f***ed up bad. Like crash and burn type s***. I hurt a lot of people, and I’m fully aware of that. And I’m going to owe for the rest of my life.”
Without naming twigs, the actor continued: “I hurt that woman. And in the process of doing that, I hurt many other people, and many other people before that woman. I was a pleasure-seeking, selfish, self-centred, dishonest, inconsiderate, fearful human being.” He went on to express gratitude for her: “Had she not intervened in my life and not created the avenue for me to experience ego death, I’d either have a really mediocre existence or I’d be dead in full.”
Armie Hammer also claimed to have experienced an ego death. In 2021, the Call Me By Your Name star found himself at the centre of an online firestorm after direct messages allegedly sent from Hammer detailed graphic sexual desires and cannibalistic fetishism. The 38-year-old actor was subsequently accused of rape and abuse. Hammer has consistently denied any criminal wrongdoing and said that all of his relationships with women were consensual. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office decided against prosecuting him due to a lack of sufficient evidence.
Speaking about the allegations on a podcast last summer, Hammer said: “I’m actually now at a place where I’m really grateful for it because, where I was in my life before all of that stuff happened to me, I didn’t feel good.” He went on to reveal that he joined a 12-step programme after the allegations surfaced as they caused both “an ego death” and “a career death”.
We don’t know whether these men experienced an ego death or not. What we do know, however, is that use of the term is becoming more widespread, which might be cause for concern when they inevitably become watered down, rendering the concept entirely meaningless.
“These terms very readily move from specialised language communities to social media, where the motive for using them can be to garner interest or secure ‘likes’,” says Dr Madison. That said, there is still a way to use it to kickstart some important self-reflection, which is ultimately what all this is supposed to be about.
The best way to draw meaning from an ego death is to ask what it means to the individual experiencing it. In other words, to ascertain if this is something you are saying simply because you feel like you should, or if you really are experiencing some sort of internal transformation. It’s a way of seeing if there’s any substance to the phrase: if you’re undergoing an ego death, what are the parts of yourself that you are letting go of? And what might they be replaced by? These sorts of conversations are likely to be far more interesting when approached like this.
“Because you’re engaging beyond assumptions, entering a generative terrain where we are willing to go into what we have not previously thought about,” says Dr Madison.
That’s something we can all practice, though, as with almost everything, it’s probably best carried out away from our screens.
