By ‘modern model’, I’m not referring to the mainstream model, as a realistic model contradicts the simplistic and self - aggrandising cultural model.

This colourful veil we, as cultures, drape over many uncomfortable realities about ourselves can be considered normal and necessary from a collective wellbeing perspective. This though doesn’t mean those uncomfortable realities don’t exist; it just means it’s possibly in our collective interests to pretend they don’t.

Which, when all is going swimmingly, when our societies are thriving and the vast majority of the individuals within that society are smiling, happy, and healthy, there’s no need to lift the veil. If it’s not broken, don’t ‘fix’ it. If the recipe generates the desired taste, don’t change it. But, when society is unraveling, when obesity and depression rates are soaring, there are clearly problems that need to be addressed; therefore, the veil needs to be lifted to allow us to become better orientated with what is, as opposed to navigating by what isn’t.

In practice, what happens on the macro, societal level just is as it is. There’s nothing an individual can do about that. Civilisations rise and inevitably fall, just as species rise, thrive for a time, and then go extinct. Day turns into night, night into day - there’s a cycle. Yin and Yang. It couldn’t be different, and so there’s no point lamenting reality. As individuals, we can just try and understand where our civilisation and species is within that cycle - which way the pendulum is swinging - and position ourselves accordingly.Nothing lasts forever; even our sun will finish burning it’s fuel and grow cold one day. We’re born, we experience this life thing for a time, and then we die. It is what it is. No big deal. But, as we’ve got time to experience, what do we want to experience? We’re going to experience something, so we might as well experience what is pleasant as opposed to what is painful and ugly. In other words, we strive for happiness. But we make happiness impossible if we’re getting upset about reality, and we make it very easy, or at least much easier, if we accept what is.

Hence, humility is the gateway to happiness, but our ego locks that gate. Think the universe should dance to the tune we personally prefer, and we’re going to experience frustration and anger as the universe doesn’t care what judgments are occurring within our skull. It just is as it is. Therefore, relax and go with the flow. Choose from the many flows that exist, dive into that one, and all the other flows are irrelevant. What’s happening over there only matters if one chooses to believe it matters. Unless one thinks they’re some kind of God, we don’t and can’t have enough knowledge to actually understand reality accurately, nor can we change what we believe reality is into our personally preferred version anyway. So don’t worry, be happy. Our preferred version of society or reality is not everyone's desired version, and what unique qualities do we actually have, outside our ego’s fevered imagination, that give us the right to impose our preferred tastes onto others?

Don’t try to move the mountain. Just move yourself.

This Taoist saying points out that reality just is. If we don't like it, ok, we can get upset and shake our fist at it; we can even grab a shovel and start moving it, but the 'problem' only exists in our head. The mountain is just doing its mountain thing. It's neither 'good' nor 'bad', right or 'wrong'. It just is. If we don't like it, if it's not to our taste, then just move somewhere else. Easy.

Easy in theory, but often hard in practice, as our ego resists accepting that our perception and understanding of reality is not the reality, and that our particular set of values are just subjective. This means that we have a part of us - our ego - that tends to strongly resist change, as often the change required to improve the quality of our lives contradicts some of the values our ego is built upon.

Thus the eternal human struggle within that Freud, amongst others, clearly saw.

It’s been about 3 decades since I’ve looked at any of Freud’s models so I’ve largely forgotten them. Even back then, I didn’t explore them to any depth, as I thought he spiraled off down random paths with his deeper explanations. That he went down random 'rabbit holes' was understandable given that he was viewing the motivations he uncovered as existing in a vacuum. I mean, our instincts, and our operating system, exist for a reason; they evolved for a purpose. Unless we take this into account, our explanations are free to wander randomly.

If we’re studying a lion in a zoo, yes, it’s a lion, but the zoo environment is far from it’s natural habitat, and this has to be taken into account when we seek to build a model that explains that lion's motivations, behaviour, and emotional wellbeing. If we deem the zoo to be the lion's natural habitat, our explanations for the lion’s unhappiness are going to overlook what should be obvious.

When it comes to our own species, we also have to take context into account. Firstly, what environment are our instincts and operating system adapted for? Once that is understood, any explanation takes into account the mismatch between our environment today and the environment we evolved to fit snugly within. Our ancestors from 10,000 years ago were exactly the same as we are, yet their environment, and especially their emotional environment, was significantly different. The nuclear family, fragile and huddled among masses of strangers, has only existed in it's current form for a few hundred years and is still not the norm in many parts of the world. While the nuclear family is a giant leap forward from many perspectives - economic, for example - it extracts an emotional price, and that cost can better explain much of the turmoil Freud witnessed in his patients than the explanations he came up with.

Individually and collectively, we’re motivated to believe we live in the best of all worlds and that we have rational control over the environment we’re shaping. That any and all progress is for the better. But in reality, we’re increasingly like the lion in the zoo. That we’ve built our own zoos and cages doesn’t mean the mismatch doesn't exist.

This isn’t a unique perspective, of course. But we’re not aware of it unless we have some idea about our own species.

One person who had the knowledge and the experience was Thor Hiederdhal. He’s famous for a couple of voyages he did on reed boats from South America to the Pacific Islands.

He did them to show that such long ocean voyage's was possible with the technology that was available thousands of years ago, and therefore the Pacific could of been populated from South America. Subsequent genetic tracing has concluded that the Pacific was populated from Asia and not South America, but showing that such voyages were possible adds to the evidence that people migrated much more, and much earlier, than we tend to give them credit for.

But whats relevant here is that he lived with his wife on a remote Pacific Island for a year, and he documents that time in the excellent book 'Fatu Hiva. Back to Nature'. I read this book decades ago, and in it he addresses this ‘progress’ concept. From my notes I made back then:

Obviously, no one can read this, but it's part of quite a long lament about 'progress' and the damage it's done.

'There were days when I roamed alone in the jungle. I would sit and meditate about anything, I felt so mentally relaxed. Here, unlike at home, we worked with our bodies and use our rested minds to enjoy all kinds of thoughts and emotions. We hunt, we fish, we collect berries, we stroll, and we swim. Our 'work' is now most people's holiday.

They sit in offices, or work with screwdrivers for 11.5 months of the year and then rush to the beaches and the mountains to do what our ancestors did all the time, and we call this progress.

I had explained to Tui about airplanes, but I would not try to explain how people back home live. He would not understand.'

To quickly go down another 'rabbit hole' of my own, what Thor is experiencing, the delicious 'zone' he entered into after some time on the island, is a good example of how we all have these different 'zones', but most of us don't realise we do.

He switched from a more dopamine- orientated reward system over to a serotonin-dominated one, and his brainwaves shifted from the fast Beta to the mellow Alpha frequency. Add in the shift to the parasympathetic nervous system - if he wasn't already in that mode - and his experience of reality is massively different than it was.

Point is, people may recoil from such a simple life as they consider they'd experience it as boring given the mode they're currently in. But they're not understanding that an avalanche of changes can happen within us. We can shift modes to mirror our environment. A bucket of hot water poured into the ocean quickly assumes the same temperature as the ocean, and this also happens to us - we tend resonate with what is around us. If we know we can shift modes, we can take ourselves into one mode or another as desired, and we know it's nearly impossible to be unhappy because we can always return to our core. We can always retreat up a mountain, can always find some rundown shack on a quiet beach, and be blissfully content after a few weeks acclimatising. Discontent and frustration is understood for what it is - a temporary mismatch between our current motivations and what the environment we're in offers.

Here's another quick quote from the same book that illustrates this:

'Resting motionless in the jungle, I could see the sun through my closed eyelids, as motionless and silent as everything else. The earth had surely stopped rotating. Not a creak, not a rustle, and somewhere on the planet there was supposed to be roaring traffic and bustling streets. What a crazy, unbelievable thought.'

What's fascinating to him, what is mind-blowing, is the level of happiness he's experiencing, yet he's not doing anything. He's not ticking boxes or jumping hurdles. He's not 'getting ahead', not adding anything, he's emptying out. What he's experiencing doesn't really make sense to his brain, as our cultural orientation tends to understand that more is more and less is less. He can't really explain it because it's got nothing to do with the brain - it's direct emotional connection with the environment - and this is happening because the brain is shut down. There's no labeling going on, and the brain has no motivations to juggle. Hence Buddha's 'By doing nothing, I do everything'. When our mode changes, everything becomes very zoomed in, and everything is in slow motion. This slow motion experience possibly relates to our brain waves slowing down, but also because just as time flies when we're busy, time also slows down if we're just staring at the wall. In the euphoric 10/10 state Thor is experiencing, there's nothing to want. What more is there? In such a state, running around chasing the things we're typically motivated to chase just seems crazy, yet we all spend most of our lives doing just that.

To our brains, nothing is nothing, so how can nothing be everything?The answer, or perhaps some of the answer, is that joy requires a vacuum to flow into. Joy is actually all around us; it's not something we hunt down; it's having the capacity to experience it, and that requires a type of emptiness. Dopamine pleasure is something we extract from the environment; the object/s of our motivations are out there somewhere, and so we venture forth to acquire them. Serotonin pleasure/joy isn't like this, instead it comes to us, or more accurately, it's always around us, but we can't connect with it because we're preoccupied with our other motivations. Joy is the soft background music that's always there, but we can only hear when the much louder dopamine music is turned off. In the modern, bustling, competitive world, it never gets turned off, and so we don't realise it can be.

Of course, we do live in the world as it is. We need to make $$ to survive, etc. This is not to say we should all go live in the jungle, it's to point out that we have different modes, or states, we can put ourselves into and live within, and that, as regards happiness, less is more. In the past, it was common for older men, after they'd completed their worldly duties, to just wander into a mountainous area and live in a cave or make a little shack. They weren't walking away from happiness; they knew they were walking towards it because, after some weeks or months, they'd enter the same state as Thor describes above.

Anyway, to get back on track;

The very first google result from searching 'Freud Ego' gives https://www.simplypsychology.org/psyche.html So let's use this to gain an understanding of Freud's model.

Freud divided the different motivations into Id, ego, and super ego.

The Id.

The id is the impulsive (and unconscious) part of our psyche that responds directly and immediately to basic urges, needs, and desires. The personality of the newborn child is all id, and only later does it develop an ego and super-ego.

The id is also stubborn, for it responds only to what Freud called the pleasure principle (if it feels good, do it), and nothing else.

Freud assumed the id operated unconsciously according to the pleasure principle (gratification from satisfying basic instincts). The id comprises two kinds of biological instincts (or drives), including the sex (life) instinct called Eros (which contains the libido) and the aggressive (death) instinct called Thanatos.

Here he’s pointing to our hardwired instincts that motivate us via the poles of pleasure and pain. Freud then goes on to label the various instincts according to his particular values. ‘Infantile’ etc. But this, to me anyway, makes no sense, as the instincts are just as they are. Yes, they are blind and selfish, but instincts are blind and selfish.

The Ego.

The ego is the only part of the conscious personality. It’s what the person is aware of when they think about themselves and what they usually try to project toward others.

The ego develops to mediate between the unrealistic id and the real external world. It is the decision-making component of personality. Ideally, the ego works by reason, whereas the id is chaotic and unreasonable.

The ego develops from the id during infancy. The ego’s goal is to satisfy the id’s demands in a safe and socially acceptable way. In contrast to the id, the ego follows the reality principle as it operates in both the conscious and unconscious mind.

The ego operates according to the reality principle, working out realistic ways of satisfying the id’s demands, often compromising or postponing satisfaction to avoid negative consequences of society.

The ego considers social realities and norms, etiquette, and rules in deciding how to behave.

Like the id, the ego seeks pleasure (i.e., tension reduction) and avoids pain, but unlike the id, the ego is concerned with devising a realistic strategy to obtain pleasure.

The ego has no concept of right or wrong; something is good simply if it achieves its end of satisfying without causing harm to itself or the id.

Often the ego is weak relative to the headstrong id, and the best the ego can do is stay on, pointing the id in the right direction and claiming some credit at the end as if the action were its own.

If the ego fails to use the reality principle and anxiety is experienced, unconscious defense mechanisms are employed to help ward off unpleasant feelings (i.e., anxiety) or make good things feel better for the individual.

The ego engages in secondary process thinking, which is rational, realistic, and orientated toward problem-solving. If a plan of action does not work, then it is thought through again until a solution is found. This is known as reality testing and enables the person to control their impulses and demonstrate self-control, via mastery of the ego.

An important feature of clinical and social work is to enhance ego functioning and help the client test reality through assisting the client to think through their options.

To me, that’s a roundabout way of just saying our ego is our brain - the intersection where our understanding of the environment meets our motivations. Our ego/brain forms an understanding of what options are realistically available to us. Then, by juggling the myriad motivations and how satisfied they will be in the short term, intermediate term, and long term, we choose various options to imagine and therefore taste. Then we go with the most flavourable one. But, it's important to remember that the process of selecting what option we decide to take has gone through many filters, and we're not starting afresh each time. We have default settings already in place. We already believe we like this and don't like that. We already know some actions are not permitted, either morally or because of the anticipated negative consequences. At the same time, it's common that some of our motivations want option A and some want option B. It's complicated, and much of it is camouflaged in the sense that we don't actually know, or sometimes even want to know, exactly what our core motivations are. We're not a single entity; we're a cluster of motivations, and those motivations don't all flow from the same source.

Super Ego.

The superego incorporates the values and morals of society, which are learned from one’s parents and others. It develops around 3 – 5 years during the phallic stage of psychosexual development.

The superego develops during early childhood (when the child identifies with the same-sex parent) and is responsible for ensuring moral standards are followed. The superego operates on the morality principle and motivates us to behave in a socially responsible and acceptable manner.

The superego is seen as the purveyor of rewards (feelings of pride and satisfaction) and punishments (feelings of shame and guilt), depending on which part (the ego-deal or conscious) is activated.

The superego is a part of the unconscious that is the voice of conscience (doing what is right) and the source of self-criticism.

It reflects society’s moral values to some degree, and a person is sometimes aware of their own morality and ethics, but the superego contains many codes, or prohibitions, that are issued mostly unconsciously in the form of commands or “don’t” statements.

The superego’s function is to control the id’s impulses, especially those which society forbids, such as sex and aggression.

It also persuades the ego to turn to moralistic goals rather than simply realistic ones and strive for perfection.

This is what we generally understand these days as 'ego'. Essentially, it's the part of us concerned with status, which is to say focused on where we are in the hierarchy we subscribe to. It evolved to function within a context of relatively small groups of people that were all known to each other, and where ones place in the hierarchy was also known and firm. But in a world filled with strangers, there’s a constant need to signal our status to others via status symbols and a constant clash of values given there's many different hierarchies.

As is written here;

It also persuades the ego to turn to moralistic goals rather than simply realistic ones and strive for perfection.

Translated, this means; The urge for status motivates us to strive for success according to our particular values alongside, and sometimes contradicting, our other instinctual motivations.

Exactly. And we can see how important this ability is for humans living in groups. We can’t just go directly to what we want, instead we have to consider the community and the collective interests. We have to have the ability to compromise and co -operate or there is no large group, and then the individual doesn’t get to share in the benefits that come from being within a large group.

But, given that we’re exclusively motivated by pleasure and pain, this restraint also motivates via pleasure and pain. If we lose status, we feel bad (pain)and if we act in a way that gains us status we feel good (pleasure). Of course, what actions make us feel pain and what actions make us feel pleasure depend upon the values we subscribe to - depends upon the hierarchy we subscribe to.

The same action can give us status or lose us status within the same group, depending upon the context that action takes place within. Kill someone in peaceful times, and we’ll be punished and lose status. But in times of war, kill many enemies, and we’ll be heroes - we'll gain status. Indeed, we might well be punished if we're unwilling to kill people. So, while the power of a hierarchy depends upon it's particular values being considered objectively true - do not kill, for example - very few, if any, of those values are actually non-negotiable in reality. This makes complete sense, as it would be obviously counterproductive for groups to be hamstrung by their own values. Values and hierarchies are tools, and if we can understand them as such, we can also, as individuals, avoid hamstringing ourselves.

-Again, in reality, what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ depends upon what values that person subscribes to and is context-dependant. But, for societies to function well, there’s a need to pretend the subjective is objective. If 3-year-old ‘Johnny’ does a negative action, we punish him which will deter him from doing it again given that that action now equals pain for him. In time, this association - that action = pain - becomes unconscious, and he feels an echo of pain just considering such actions. Johnny then grows up with those values and teaches his kids those values. He can even believe they are the true values because that’s how it seems to him and how it feels. We don’t go to little Johnny; ‘hey son, don’t do that as it’s bad. Well, of course it’s only subjectively bad, so not really bad actually- it's just our cultural values, and it makes me feel bad so don’t do it, please’

Obviously, we can’t competently function in groups like this, so we think and communicate in a binary good-and-bad manner. Completely normal, and it has to be like this for the well-being of the group. The group's priority is to survive, and the bigger the group, the more likely that is, so we're not concerned with the ‘truth’ outside of the small scientific community, and even there facts are subservient to emotions (including ego) and ideology.While most of the rabbit holes Freud went down are not taken seriously these days, he was probably the first to see and attempt to explain the three underlying components of our operating system. I think it's tidier, and easier to simply understand them along the lines of instincts; core individual motivations. Ego; socially constructed motivations that have their power via the instinct for status. Brain; the interface between our motivations and the environment.

But neither my model nor the closely related Freudian model tends to be glorious enough for our tastes. It doesn’t put us on a high pedestal; instead, it robs us of the status we like to feel we richly deserve. In short, it contradicts the rightness of the right and good values we, collectively and individually, are driven to believe.

But this need to have an emotional veil over reality is a double-edged sword, as it stops us from being able to align the inner forces much better and so experience a high level of happiness easier. If we refuse to acknowledge them, we cannot adjust them. If we can’t acknowledge that we’re not actually existing in the best of all possible worlds, and that we’re not uniquely in possession of the truth, we lose all perspective and lose the flexibility to improve the quality of our lives.

The collective probably has to believe in and promote the warm and pleasant fairy tales. Sure. But that doesn't mean we, as individuals, also have to. Just because, at one time, we likely believed in Santa Claus doesn't mean we have to continue to believe that.