Is Self-Development A Luxury Right Now?

The world feels like it's on fire — the economy, AI, a war in the Middle East — and here's Neil talking about the inner workings of the ego. Isn't that a luxury? This episode takes the objection head-on. The argument: the inner work isn't a luxury, it's the spare wheel that matters most when you break down — and it's the one piece of the chaos actually in your hands. 

And it's needed more than ever: the same bug in the human OS that we've been tracing across this series (the need to be right, to look good, to assert our preferences) isn't just personal. The social media machinery has turned that bug into a feature and given it maximum leverage. And that's before we get to the billionaires whose wealth gives them even more. 

Featuring a conversation about a war that didn't turn into a fight, the principle of finding the flaw in yourself first, and the moment a relationship turned on that internal move.

Show notes:

Some of you have been sitting with this for a few episodes: aren't there more pressing things to worry about than the ego? Neil answers directly — and argues that under pressure is exactly when this work earns its keep.

In this episode:

• A conversation about the Israel–Iran conflict that two people navigated without needing to be right
• Why more money makes you more stupid, more power makes you more corrupt — and unconscious ego reactions just get longer levers
• The spare-wheel test: why self-mastery as a "luxury" is upside-down 
• Container, not content — the second-order view (and why that's not a false equivalence)
• What actually changed: social media versus having editors who held the reaction at bay
• Your ten square metres — this generation's version of Stoicism
• Be the change: Krishnamurti's two-week discipline, and finding it in yourself first
• A living example from one of the most charged subjects of our time

References mentioned: Krishnamurti · Gandhi ("be the change") · the Stoics · Episode 3 (seeing at the phenomenological level) · Episode 5 (surrender and the Stoics)

Links: 

Get the written companion: https://substack.com/@neilbierbaum 

Work with me (keynote speaker, thinking partner, coach): https://neilbierbaum.com 

If something landed, subscribe, rate and review wherever you're listening.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This is what to believe, finding signal in the noise. I'm Neil Biaba, a journalist turned master coach. Reporting what I found across four decades of investigation into the human condition, what I've found is a flaw in the human operating system, one that makes it hard for us to face the truth about ourselves and leaves us believing things about ourselves and the world that are false. You'll find a strange comfort here, the comfort of knowing how little is really true, how little of it really matters, and what to do with the reality that remains.

– What we're doing in this series

SPEAKER_00 0:32

Welcome back to another episode in this series where I'm exposing the flaw in the human operating system, one mechanism at a time, from different angles, using hundreds of examples. And remember, what we're doing here is learning to look at things directly, so that you can gain an insight that causes a direct and immediate shift in behavior. You don't have to process your feelings about it. You see something and the behavior changes, and the thinking and feeling can catch up afterwards. That gives you the power to self-manage in a way that doesn't cost you, and where giving up something is not experienced as a loss. The gain is self-mastery. The gain is the freedom that you get out of it.

– "Isn't this a luxury?"

SPEAKER_00 1:12

So let me start where some of you might have been sitting for a few episodes already, my hunch tells me. And that is that there are more pressing things to worry about out there in the world, aren't there? I mean, it feels like the world's on fire, the economy is struggling, money is tight, everybody's concerned about the future with AI. And here I am talking about the inner workings of the ego and developing a level of self-mastery. Isn't that a luxury? Well, I want to take that head on because if I can't answer it, firstly, I've got no business asking for your time, and secondly, I want to show you why it does deserve your time and how this is relevant for what's going on in the world today. So I really want to create those links for you today.

– A conversation about a war

SPEAKER_00 1:56

And an illustration of that came up for me when I recently caught up with an old friend, someone I haven't seen for many years, and we were sharing some time together, and the subject inevitably wandered onto the state of the world. And just for the record, we're in the middle of the US, Iran, Israel Middle East conflict around the Strait of Hormuz and everything else going on there. It feels like the start of World War III almost in some respects, and like a situation that's never going to end, is how it's feeling at the moment. And she pointed to the time that she had spent on a kibbutz in Israel as a young person. And she said how her time there probably colours the way she sees what's happening there now, because of her relationships with the people, the way she felt towards them. Now, I'm not interested for this conversation and who's right and taking sides. Specifically, we're not about that here. What stood out for me was how the two of us could navigate through the conversation because we could both see the lens that we were looking through. Neither of us needed to be right. And neither one left feeling frustrated or resigned. We had a clear view on what was real and what mattered in that moment. We were able to self-manage.

– The two extremes people are stuck between

SPEAKER_00 3:11

What I'm hearing and seeing is that a lot of people are struggling with that. A lot of people are flipping between the two extremes, either passionate engagement that leads to conflict and they feel that that's necessary and important and they have to do that. Or they're becoming frustrated and withdrawn, resigned, confused. And for many, it's difficult to know what view to hold. And so that's my first point is that learning to manage your automatic mechanistic ego reactions or seeing the flaw in the human operating system, that can relieve you of that burden and give you a clear sense of how to manage yourself in those situations, not just externally, but internally as well. So you can remain peaceful inside, not just pretend to be peaceful on the outside.

– More power, longer levers for the ego

SPEAKER_00 3:59

And here's another reason why this matters, why you'd want to work on yourself, improve your self-awareness, self-management, self-mastery. And it's to do with something else that I'm seeing, and that is people's sense of things being out of control. And I want to come at it through this angle. So there's a saying that if you're stupid with money, more money makes you more stupid. If you can picture someone who has bad spending habits, who keeps running out of money, and then they think, well, if I only had more money, I'd stop running out of money. But they don't change the habits. So they make the same mistakes, just bigger, and end up in the same place. So more money doesn't solve the problem, it just scales it up. And the same goes for power. We know the saying that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. So more power makes you more corrupt. And you can run that exact line through everything we've been talking about with the ego. So if you're unconscious about your automatic mechanistic ego reactions, in other words, you're driven by them, the need to be right, the need to look good, the need to assert your preferences. And let's say you don't have an enormous amount of power, you're just an ordinary person, so then you do it on an ordinary scale. But if we put you in charge of a country or turn you into a billionaire and you do the identical thing, the same mechanistic ego reactions, in that situation, you're able to do it with greater leverage. So more power doesn't necessarily make you wiser. It just gives you ego mechanisms longer levers, more leverage. And we're seeing a fair bit of that in the world today, I believe. Right? Okay, so maybe that just increases your sense of powerlessness, but hold on to it, we'll come back to it. What you can do

– Under pressure, the ego gets louder

SPEAKER_00 5:43

about it. Because we are feeling a little powerless and under pressure, right? And when you're under pressure, do you naturally turn into a Zen monk? Or do you also become somewhat more reactive when you're stressed about money? You don't suddenly become all wise and peaceful. No, you go into some of those defensive reactions. So someone tries to give you advice and you deny there's a problem, there's that looking good. Or you fight to be right about the way you've done things when they suggest alternatives or try to shift some responsibility and accountability to you, become defensive about that. Or you assert your preferences more strongly than ever about what needs to happen next. So those ego mechanisms under pressure don't go quite, they get louder. But the assumption that working on self-awareness and self-management is a luxury is actually upside down. If you only do it when you're comfortable and retired and treating every day like Sunday, then it is a luxury. And in that case, you'll only ever get the concept intellectually. You'll apply it when nothing's at stake. You won't pressure test it. The value of a spare wheel and a jack in your car is not for when you're driving and cruising along happily, it's for when you've broken down.

– Why we're all avoiding the news

SPEAKER_00 6:54

So that's an example on a personal level. But a lot of the stress we're carrying comes from the social context. And one of the things in particular that I'm seeing is that people are avoiding the news. I hear this anecdotally, I experienced it myself, and I've even read statistics about it. And that's an interesting one because you'd think that with all the research and data we have available to us these days, we'd be getting somewhere. We'd be making progress on the big issues of our time. But we're not. And that's a massive indicator, massive tell, because the moment some new study or new information lands, people interpret it in a hundred different ways. And instantly everyone needs to be right that their reading is the right one. So we kind of all agree that there's a bit of a problem in the world in terms of the progress we're making economically, etc. And we kind of agree vaguely on the desired outcome, some form of peace and prosperity. But where we fail is our reasons why, like what caused this in the first place, and our the solutions that we offer. And on those, we keep falling over the same mechanism. Everybody's need to be right about their interpretation and nobody's

– Container, not content (not a false equivalence)

SPEAKER_00 8:06

listening. I need to be careful here because this is where it may get misheard. I'm not talking about a false equivalence. I'm not saying both positions are equal. That's first order stuff. I'm going second order, looking at the deeper layer. I'm looking at the container, not the content. If you're a drum beating for the good guys or the bad guys, or for the winners or the losers, you're still a drum. Or to revert to the analogy I've used in the past, whether you're a Toyota or a Ferrari, you're still a car that needs fuel, compression, ignition, exhaust. So I'm pointing one layer beneath the content at the mechanism. And two people can be on opposite sides and both be running the same mechanism, both needing to be right, both making the other wrong, both feeding the thing that keeps the fight going. You can be completely correct in your position and still be running the engine that makes the conflict worse. The content and the mechanism, two different things. I'm talking about the mechanism. How does this affect you? Because you might not be playing in that field. Maybe you're not an academic on a panel at a conference. Okay. You're just a person going to work, trying to live a decent life. How does any of this touch you? Well, I'm sure you've experienced this. You see it in the news, you look around and you feel a sense of powerlessness, despair, agitation, as I've described. And you want to hold a view on it. You want to know what answer to hold in your mind without going into resignation and just ignoring the news, looking away, because that's just a coping mechanism. If you can't be right, and you don't want to be because it's also confusing and overwhelming and the world's gone mad, then what can you be? The answer is to see how those mechanisms are running out there, in those people and in the environment, and how they're running in you. And in the space between is where you can find some peace, some sanity, some solid ground.

– What actually changed: social media

SPEAKER_00 9:55

So what is happening out there to cause so much despair, frustration, anger? What has changed? Because this flaw, the egos need to be right, isn't new. What's new is the machinery that's risen up and built around it. And the single biggest shift in the last couple of decades is social media. And I know this from the inside because I'm the one putting things out there. And the first rule is that you have to land the hook in the first five seconds or you lose people. And what lands the hook is controversy. Why? Because controversy triggers an immediate ego reaction. People read, they bristle, and then they fire off a response. And the platform rewards exactly that and pushes it further. The whole system is built to leverage the automatic mechanistic ego reaction. It runs on the need to be right. Now compare that to how it was before. There used to be curators in the form of an editor. I was one myself. And it's not so much that we were gatekeepers, whether you liked them or not, is beside the point. The fact is that a million people did not have a platform to fire off their automatic ego reactions every minute of every day. You had to write a letter to the editor, you had to submit your article and wait for a response. So things were slower. You had time to cool off and your work didn't see the light of day. So that force inside people was kind of filtered, it was held at bay. You could go and have it out at the bar, you know, shout your opinion at the bar for sure, and then reach 10 people around you, maybe have a bar fight, something like that. But it didn't escalate out across the whole world the way it does now on a constant, ongoing basis.

– One thread through the whole mess

SPEAKER_00 11:30

There wasn't an algorithm decided by a small group of profit-oriented people constantly tweaking it to give these automatic mechanistic ego reactions maximum leverage. So here's the thing I most want to land is that this flaw, the need to be right, it's in me at home with my family at work, and it's on steroids in the world we're living in right now. Because the machinery has been built to amplify it. And once you can see that single thread running through all of it, you can suddenly have a relationship to the whole mess that you didn't have before. And by the way, the need to be right to look good, to assert our preferences, these are only some of the ego reactions. There are more to come. We'll unpack some more as we go through this.

– Your ten square metres — our Stoicism

SPEAKER_00 12:13

So what can you actually do? Well, a few things. Firstly, you can manage yourself. You can take responsibility for the 10 square meters of reality that you genuinely own and control, which is more than it sounds. And it's the only ground that nobody can take from you. I talked about this in the previous episode about the Stoics. They did the same within Greek culture, ancient Greek culture, which was all about fate and the gods controlling everything. So you didn't have a say. But the one piece of real estate you did control was your mind, your response to everything that was happening despite you. And we've kind of turned the full circle and gone back to that. Now we have billionaire gods, media gods, political gods, oligarchs who are deciding everything for us. That's the struggle. And this is our version of Stoicism is understanding and becoming fully aware of the mechanistic ego reaction. So we're going into it at a greater level of detail than the Stoics did. We're getting more detail on how these things operate. And hopefully we can overcome those oligarchs in some way. We'll talk about that

– Watching without getting sucked in

SPEAKER_00 13:19

too. Second thing you can do is you can watch what's happening out there without getting sucked into it if you have this awareness of the ego mechanistic ego reactions. You can do that without feeling you have to climb into the drama and pick up a weapon. You can see the mechanism running in other people and in you and not be dragged along by it. And also not have to give in to resignation because you don't know what's going on or you don't know what opinion to form. And I'll make this practical with an example. And you'll see the example will point out that it's not easy. So nobody promised easy on this. The reward, as I've said, is the self-mastery and the freedom that you gain from that. Reward is not feeling confused or weighed down or having that extra stress of not knowing what view to hold, and then switching to not caring because that's the only option you can see. The reward is seeing what's real and what matters.

– Be the change you want to see

SPEAKER_00 14:14

Before I get to the example, just to mention a principle that I work from. And it's maybe where I might be a little bit mad to think any of you will come along with me, but you know, hopefully you will. And it comes partly from my upbringing. So I was brought up hearing the old lines do unto others, and that him who is without sin cast the first stone. I don't practice Christianity as a religion. I'm not advocating any religion, but I was raised in that tradition. And you'd have to be willfully blind, I would say, to not see the validity in those stories. And then there is Gandhi who said, Be the change you want to see in the world. And then Krishnamurti, who I've mentioned before. He didn't just teach this, he practiced it as a discipline. So the story goes that when he wanted to effect a change in someone, he'd send them away for two weeks. And during those two weeks, he had work on the very same thing in himself. A woman once brought her child to him and he saw the child needed to give up sugar, there was a diabetes thing, so he sent them away and gave up sugar himself for the fortnight so that when he gave the instruction, he embodied it. And if he saw someone needing to stop blaming, for example, he'd spend the two weeks hunting for where he might still be blaming and working it out within himself. And that's the principle behind everything I do as a coach. I'm constantly looking for where and how I'm doing the very thing my client is facing to the degree I can see it in myself, I can support my client to see it in themself and to reckon with it and to master it. And I do the same when I write and present this work. If I talk to you about the need to be right while I'm quietly assuming that I don't do it, I'll come across preachy, self-righteous, and it won't land. So in preparing this while writing, while speaking, I'm always orienting myself in the same way. I'm asking myself, in what way am I still doing this? In what way am I still the one needing to be right, needing to look good? But the point is, whatever you think is wrong in the world, you're already doing it in some form. If we dig around, scratch around hard enough, long enough, look properly, honestly, we'll find it. May not be the main thing you do all the time. Might be an exception occasionally, but it'll be there.

– Find it in yourself first

SPEAKER_00 16:25

So whatever you want to fix out there, you and the world are better off if you find it in yourself first. And this is the best thing that you can do right now for yourself and for the world. And so that's the underlying principle. And then I'm going to give you this example that I'm mentioned earlier. And it's from my own life. It goes like this.

– A living example: an angry fourteen-year-old

SPEAKER_00 16:45

At age 50, I met my now wife and her two then teenage children. The girl was 14 and caught up in gender politics and frankly angry at the world, and especially at men. I had no need to prove anything to her, so I wasn't trying to push my views. But inevitably, something happened, something was on television or whatever it was, I can't remember the details, and we clashed anyway over something that was said. And I caught myself in that moment about to do the obvious thing to prove that I was right and get carried away by the need to be right. And I realized if I want her to yield, to soften, to listen, then I would have to demonstrate the very thing I'm asking of her by the same principle I've just mentioned. I couldn't walk in being right and expect her to give up being right. I would have to give up first if that's what I wanted to see in her. And that's an internal move. It's like turning a key and a lock inside yourself. The lock that just goes, maybe I'm not right. Maybe I can give this up. Even when I can't quite see how, even when I'm angry, even when I can feel the whole pressure of my position wanting to assert itself, I can still turn the key, let it go. As I said, it's not easy. This is one of the most difficult things to do in the world. And precisely why it's so powerful. And so I did that. I did the internal switch first, and then I found her, and I apologized for the way that I'd spoken to her. And notice what I didn't do. I didn't address the content. I didn't say I was wrong. I didn't say she was right. I didn't try to resolve the argument. I just brought an energy, an attitude, of openness, a willingness, a readiness to surrender my position and listen if and when I need to. And that part was felt by her because it was real. And it was hard to do, as I said, but it was real. And what's also important to note is I didn't make myself right for being the one to give up being right. I didn't do it with self-righteousness, in other words. I addressed my own behavior and I let her feel my way of being, that openness and not needing to win. Just that. She might tell the story differently, I've never asked her, but I believe that that was the moment that our relationship turned and when she started to trust me. And that cracked open a window on the possibility of her seeing other men differently too. As I said, there was never a moment where we needed to resolve our differences or agree our points of view. There became an open space of allowing in which differences could exist and a conversation could happen when it needed to happen. So that's a living example for me. And I'm sure you'll agree, it sits right inside one of the most charged subjects of our time. And it's not theory, it's real.

– What practising this gives you

SPEAKER_00 19:31

So now if I've put that together with what I said earlier, be the change you want to see in the world, what does that give me or give us or give you? Well, if you learn to do that, if you practice it wholeheartedly in your life, not just in the easy moments, although you should start with the easy moments, you don't go to the gym and lift the heavy weights on day one, but ultimately in the difficult ones too, then you'll be doing three things. There may be more here, not quite sure how many I've got on my list. The first is that you're freeing yourself up from the pain and drama that being right causes. Because if you've ever looked at yourself when you're trying to be right and you're not getting anywhere, it's not a happy moment. The second thing you'll be doing for yourself is that you're developing the muscle to do the same with other automatic mechanistic ego reactions. So giving up the need to look good, to assert your preferences, and so on. Third thing is you're affecting how other people are in the world, and that can have a knock-on effect, the butterfly effect, as illustrated in my example. The young lady shifted her view, the possibility of how she saw men in general. And maybe that could even reach a tipping point in society as a whole. You never know. That would be my great hope and the reason why I'm doing this. And yes, there is a fourth one, which is you would recognize the mechanism when it's active in others, and so you can see it at that level, at the phenomenological level. I covered this in episode three about seeing things at that level instead of getting lost in the thinking and the analyzing. And by seeing it at that level, you would not get confused about which side you should take. You wouldn't need to become frustrated or resigned because you can see the mechanism at play, and you can allow, you can wait patiently for the day that your demonstrations have that butterfly effect, for the day they reach a tipping point, instead of having to prove your point in the moment, instead of having to take sides. And that enables a level of peacefulness and conscious awareness in the situation.

– Acting without the "being right" layer

SPEAKER_00 21:31

And that doesn't mean you can't take action in the meantime. What action should you take? Well, whatever works for you. But do it without the being right layer. Beat your drum, but also pause to listen. Stop being the drum when you don't need to be the drum. And one action I think we can agree on from this that I would propose is that we should all be lobbying for social media governance or boycotting social media that actively promote mechanistic ego reactions. Something like that. That for me would be a sophisticated response to the world right now.

– The atom: the one piece of chaos in your hands

SPEAKER_00 22:04

So to go all the way back to where we started, are there more pressing issues and things to worry about? I don't think there are many more pressing issues than this, not because it's grand, but because it's the one piece of chaos that's actually in your hands. For me, it's a tiny piece, but it's like the atom. That tiny atom, the smallest particle in the universe, contains all the energy of the universe when it's unleashed. So for me, this is the lens. It's how I see the world every minute of every day. It's what I'm seeing all the time. And I'll be honest, it pains me to see it and feel like I'm mostly standing here on my own, wishing more people were seeing the same thing, which is why I'm doing this, sharing this. And some days it feels a bit lonely, a bit like farting against thunder. One person unclenching against the universe. But it's the one thing genuinely inside my domain of power, and it costs me nothing, and nobody can take it away from me. And it has to start somewhere with some individual embodying it, and then letting it spread, seeing it spread until maybe one day it does reach that tipping point. Maybe it makes a difference out there. Maybe it doesn't. I'll be honest again, I can't see another way. And if you see it too, I hope that you'll share this.

– Outro

SPEAKER_00 23:20

That's what to believe for this week. If you're finding value from this, please subscribe, rate, and review wherever you're listening. If something landed, not just made sense, but actually landed, then share it with someone who you believe could benefit from it as well. That's how this work spreads. You'll find a written companion on Substack under my name. And if you want to take it further, there are ways to work with me. You'll find the link in the show notes. Avni Opi Abam, thank you for listening. See you next time.