Self Esteem or Ego – Which is Better?

Are you proud about yourself or are you confident about yourself? Do you think others are inferior in comparison to you or do you think everyone has a mix of good and bad personality traits? Do you often face relationship issues with the people in your life or do you enjoy harmonious and pleasant relationships with most people?

The answers to the questions mentioned above would get you closer to understanding how you think about yourself and whether you have good self esteem or lots of ego.

Which is better, Self esteem or Ego?

Most religious texts as well as spiritual literature talk about the Ego as the basis of most of the trouble in life. The Ego is indeed something very negative while Self esteem is something very necessary as well as very positive.

Self esteem

When one has high self esteem, that individual knows their positive personality traits as well as their shortcomings with a lot of clarity. This gives one a stable self-image that helps in facing life’s situations with a calm, cool mindset.

Ego

The story with the Ego is a bit different. When a person doesn’t know their own positive traits in their mind, they become extremely dependent on the opinion of others in reference to what they think of him or her.

If the people around this person think well, then the egoistic person feels good about themselves and vice-versa. Since a person feels very vulnerable in such a scenario, they develop a thick crust to protect themselves from the negative opinion of others since the pain caused through others’ insensitive judgments or negative opinions cannot be countered using any positive knowledge that they possesses about themselves

This crust is ego. Ego causes a person to think of himself as being more superior than what one objectively is; so that he will not appear as vulnerable as he actually feels to the world outside.

An egoistic person tries to show themselves in a more exaggerated form than the actual reality, so others will also believe what that person so desperately wants them to believe. This exaggerated form is the egoistic appearance one wears. This process happens in such a subtle manner that most egoistic people don’t even realize it themselves.

Objective Criterion of Self esteem

The objective criterion of thinking well about oneself (self esteem) is the number of positive traits one possesses in comparison to the number of negative ones. The intensity of any given positive trait that one possesses is another objective criterion of thinking well about oneself.

When a person is egoistic, he or she justifies this superior position caused by the ego in comparison to others in his or her mind by thinking negatively about others or by choosing to focus on others’ negative traits and ignoring their positive traits.

The beauty of positive traits gets supplanted by the ugliness that is a part and parcel of the ego when one becomes egoistic about some good quality or possession that one has been blessed with.

Cases in Point

If a beautiful woman is egoistic about her beauty and looks down upon all those who aren’t as beautiful as she is, she will soon seem ugly when someone gets to know her well.

Wealthy people who consider the poor as lesser mortals and possess arrogance based on their wealth are seldom genuinely respected by anyone.