October 8, 2026
Why the Ego Is Always Hungry
The ego always lives with an outstretched hand. Even when a person feels they have already achieved a great deal, a quiet demand remains inside: more. A little more attention, more recognition, more confirmation of their own importance. We must be noticed, appreciated, thanked, understood, chosen. And the strangest thing is that getting what we want almost never ends this hunger. We were praised — and we want to be praised again. We reached a position — and the fear of losing it appears. We gained recognition — and we begin to notice, painfully, those who don’t recognise us. The ego can never be fed for good, because it feeds not on what a person has but on the feeling that they have still been shortchanged.
That is why one can possess a great deal and live with a constant sense of lack. Sometimes poverty has nothing to do with the amount of money or opportunity. A person can be surrounded by attention and suffer because someone else got attention too. They can have power and feel humiliated because of one person who refused to obey. They can hear a hundred good words and spend the whole evening thinking about one bad one. The ego has an astonishing ability to turn abundance into scarcity.
Love is made completely differently. It does not keep asking how much it has received. Its natural question is: what more can flow through me to another person? Not because a loving person must forget about themselves or let others take advantage of their kindness. Love does not require us to destroy our own dignity. It simply frees us from the need to measure life only by the amount we have received.
Mishlei says: “The liberal soul shall be made fat: and he that watereth shall be watered also himself” (11:25). There is a remarkable paradox here: the one who gives is the one who is filled. By the logic of possession it should be the other way round. If you give, you have less. But the soul does not live by the laws of the wallet. Money really can be divided, bread can be divided, time is limited. But mercy, gratitude, the ability to support and to love grow precisely when a person uses them.
Perhaps that is why some people leave a sense of warmth behind them after a conversation, even though they did nothing special. They simply know how to be present, to listen, to notice, not to turn every conversation into a story about themselves. And next to others you can spend a long time and still feel a strange emptiness, because every conversation eventually comes back to one question: what is in it for me?
The ego makes a person the centre of the world, but that is exactly why the world around them gradually becomes small. Everything begins to be judged by one’s own benefit, one’s own hurt, one’s own success, one’s own defeat. Love gives a person back the vast world of other people. And suddenly it turns out that someone else’s joy takes nothing away from us, someone else’s success does not make us smaller, and good done without witnesses does not become meaningless just because no one will ever know about it.
Perhaps one of the most important questions worth asking ourselves now and then is not “Why wasn’t I given this?” or even “Why wasn’t I appreciated?”, but something much simpler: what became better today because I was here?
Because one day we will leave behind everything we tried so hard to hold on to. And then it will turn out that true wealth was measured not by how much of the world we managed to take for ourselves, but by how much good managed to pass through us to others.
All its life the ego tries to fill a person with the world. Love does something greater — it fills the world with a person.