Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux - Be Prepared for Ego Death
Aired: 2025-03-22
Duration: 06:42


=== Be Prepared for Ego Death (06:21) ===

[00:00:00]  My wife and I are having a first child this August.
[00:00:03]  Do you have any tips for first-time parents?
[00:00:04]  We are super excited.
[00:00:06]  Thank you.
[00:00:06]  Just donated at freedomain.com /donate.
[00:00:12]  So be prepared.
[00:00:14]  Be prepared for ego death as a parent.
[00:00:20]  Be prepared for ego death.
[00:00:22]  When you become a parent...
[00:00:24]  You get a blissful relief from self-involvement for the rest of your natural born days.
[00:00:31]  I have a bit of water stuck in my ear.
[00:00:34]  It's a little crazy.
[00:00:35]  Anyway, so, yeah, you just experience ego death.
[00:00:38]  It's no longer ever going to be just about you.
[00:00:42]  It's about what's best for your children.
[00:00:44]  It's about what's best for your marriage.
[00:00:45]  You are now part of a machine.
[00:00:46]  You are not a self-contained automaton.
[00:00:49]  You are not a robot.
[00:00:50]  You are a cog in a larger machine of protection.
[00:00:54]  And provision and the great chain of being.
[00:00:58]  You take your place in the link in the chain rather than being the bike to yourself.
[00:01:02]  It sounds like a diminishment, but it's really not.
[00:01:05]  Sacrificing your ego for that which is greater than yourself allows you to partake of eternity.
[00:01:11]  And there's nothing else that can do it.
[00:01:12]  Everything that is selfish and for your own ego will be voided and consumed when you die.
[00:01:20]  If you are a sex addict and you go out and have a lot of sex for yourself, Well, all of those memories and all of those experiences and all of that history just die with you.
[00:01:28]  Right? So, if you do a bunch of drugs, then all of your drug visions and all of your memories and all of that just die with you.
[00:01:38]  If you're an alcoholic and you don't partake in anything larger, all hedonism is mortal.
[00:01:47]  All eternity is immortal.
[00:01:49]  And by...
[00:01:51]  Sacrificing your ego for the sake of that which is universal and eternal allows you to live forever.
[00:01:57]  This is why we have the story of heaven, that if you pursue virtue, you do not die.
[00:02:02]  That's true.
[00:02:03]  It's true.
[00:02:04]  It's more than true.
[00:02:05]  It's vivid.
[00:02:07]  So ego death is defying mortality and uniting yourself with the eternal, the universal, the unending, and the immortal.
[00:02:17]  And that's what you're doing as parents.
[00:02:18]  It's no longer about you.
[00:02:21]  It's no longer about you.
[00:02:23]  So, ego death is something to be striven for with great energy and focus.
[00:02:33]  You should want relief from personal greed.
[00:02:37]  And you should want to...
[00:02:39]  I mean, this is what I've done with philosophy.
[00:02:41]  Philosophy, for me, required, demanded, and enacted a guillotine execution of my ego.
[00:02:49]  I now bend myself to that which is true, universal, best for the world, best for virtue, best for children.
[00:02:58]  I have sacrificed greed for immediate pleasures for the sake of virtue in eternity.
[00:03:09]  That's the deal.
[00:03:10]  You trade in your selfish pleasures, and in return, you get to live forever.
[00:03:19]  Do good and get love.
[00:03:22]  It's a good deal.
[00:03:23]  So you just have to put aside what you want and focus on what is best for the family unit, what is best for society.
[00:03:31]  Now through that you get what is in fact best for yourself.
[00:03:34]  I get it.
[00:03:34]  It's not a sacrifice.
[00:03:36]  But you have to let go of petty pleasures.
[00:03:39]  And that the parents, I'm not putting you in this category, the parents who do badly are the parents who don't do that, right?
[00:03:44]  As I sort of mentioned many years ago.
[00:03:47]  My father was in charge of me when I was a toddler, a baby toddler, and he wanted to play tennis, and I was a baby toddler.
[00:03:56]  I was crawling, so I was probably less than a year old because I remember being a year old.
[00:04:02]  It's about probably a year, maybe 14 months.
[00:04:05]  So I was crawling around, and my father was playing his tennis and got distracted or focused on his tennis game, and I ended up crawling into a garden shed and drinking weed killer and almost died.
[00:04:19]  This was, I assume, one of the final straws with regards to my parents' marriage.
[00:04:23]  Now, I hope my father had a really, really great tennis match, because that was kind of it for us.
[00:04:28]  It certainly was it for his marriage, and it was it for his parenting in the immediate or in the moment.
[00:04:37]  So, he wanted to play tennis, and he viewed me as a baby toddler.
[00:04:49]  As an impediment to what he wanted.
[00:04:54]  That's a bad idea.
[00:04:55]  You put aside what you want and you focus on what is best for whatever machinery you happen to inhabit.
[00:05:04]  It could be virtue.
[00:05:05]  It could be proselytizing Bitcoin.
[00:05:07]  It could be the promotion of peaceful parenting.
[00:05:09]  It could be a family.
[00:05:11]  It could be whatever you can do that gives you relief and escape from your own petty self.
[00:05:18]  Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished to get escape, get away from the infinite grumble and pestilence of immediate needs and moments.
[00:05:31]  My father wanted to win the tennis match and he lost everything of value.
[00:05:40]  And he was playing with a person as stupendously selfish as himself who didn't say, Hey, don't you have a kid to take care of?
[00:05:48]  What are you doing here?
[00:05:50]  You got a toddler.
[00:05:51]  What are you doing?
[00:05:53]  I don't want to laugh.
[00:05:55]  But it's like, you win one game and you lose everything else.
[00:06:00]  It's a bad deal.
[00:06:02]  It's a bad deal.
[00:06:03]  Like the guys who sleep with other women, you get one rail session and you lose everything.
[00:06:12]  Or maybe you fake...
[00:06:15]  The car driving into a wily coyote painted horizon.
[00:06:18]  And then you lose everything.

=== Reputation's Price (00:21) ===

[00:06:21]  Reputation. Now, I don't mind burning my reputation up like a Roman candle or like a nuclear strike zone.
[00:06:29]  I don't mind sacrificing my reputation because the desire for reputation at the expense of virtue is just another ego greed situation.
[00:06:38]  You've got to be willing to burn it all to be good.
[00:06:42]  All of it.