(Costume by us. Not verified by history.)
Somewhere on TikTok, "ego death" became a thing you achieve, like a fitness goal or a personal record. Do the breathwork, take the substance, meditate hard enough, and you'll dissolve into pure bliss consciousness forever. It's presented like a finish line.
Alan Watts, who spent a career translating non-dual Eastern philosophy for a Western audience obsessed with self-improvement, would have found that framing a little funny — and a little telling. Because the actual idea isn't that you destroy your ego and become someone new. It's that you stop mistaking the character you play for the whole of what you are.
The metaphor Watts actually used
Watts liked to describe the ego as a role you're playing inside something much larger — not a mistake to correct, a mask to burn, or an enemy to defeat. Just a role. The problem was never that you have an ego. The problem is forgetting it's a role, and white-knuckling your way through life defending it like it's the only thing keeping you alive.
That reframe changes what "ego death" would even mean. It's not an event. It's not a permanent state you unlock and keep forever after one strong session. It's more like a loosening — noticing the grip instead of fighting it, again and again, probably for the rest of your life. Less a finish line, more a practice you keep returning to.
Two ways to actually practice this
Name the narrator. For one day, mentally narrate your own thoughts in the third person — "he's worried they'll think he's boring," "she wants credit for this." At the end of the day, notice what your narrator talks about most. That's usually exactly where your ego has the tightest grip.
Make it a game, on purpose. Think of something you're gripping tightly right now — a goal, an identity, an outcome that feels like a verdict on your worth if it doesn't work out. Rewrite it, deliberately, as a game with its own rules that you chose to play. Games can be played loosely. Verdicts can't.
One honest caution
If you're exploring altered states specifically to chase this experience — substances, extreme breathwork, prolonged isolation — that's a different and much higher-stakes conversation than journaling, and worth being genuinely careful with, ideally with real support around you rather than alone. Dissolving your sense of self can also be something that happens involuntarily during a mental health crisis, not just something to chase recreationally, and the two can be hard to tell apart from the inside. If anything here feels like it's describing an experience you're already having and struggling with, rather than a practice you're choosing to try, that's worth bringing to a doctor or therapist directly.
If this way of holding your ego a little more lightly — not destroying it, not worshipping it either — is useful to you, it's the whole premise behind the Integration Workbook, alongside Stoic philosophy and Jungian shadow work. No pressure — the two practices above are enough to actually start with.