Eric Oliver

We can see this in our food.

We can see this with the internet, which triggers all of these dopamine releases and keeps us coming back for more and more and more.

We can see it in just all the consumeristic pleasures that are offered to us in our modern capitalist society.

And so all of these things are really taking our animal processes and

and just hijacking them and pulling them out of whack.

And so no wonder we often feel so torn apart and pulled in so many different directions.

Oh, sure.

I'm like, oh, honey, got to walk the dog again.

My dog knows our neighborhood bodega very, very well.

Right.

And we could see this in what I would describe as sort of this fourth layer of self, which I would call the egoistic self.

So all of us have these egos and egos are really just these suite of neural processes that are there to help us get what we want from other people.

And our egos, you know, defend our entitlements and our rights, but they also are there to keep us from saying awkward things or things that might later get us in trouble.

So we have these suite of ego mechanisms and they get wrapped up in our identities and our aspirations.

We can see this oftentimes when we're just daydreaming and oftentimes we drift into thinking, oh, I shouldn't have done that before.

That was such a terrible mistake.

Or, oh, I can't wait for this to happen and dreaming about the future.

And our egos always pull us oftentimes in these very uncomfortable directions here.

And we typically then think that that's the totality of ourselves.

We oftentimes just get so compressed by these ego processes.