Ego Death at an Online Meeting
Originally written on Sunday, November 9, 2025
In episode 7 of Severance season 2 "Chikhai Bardo", there's a lot of discussions about ego deaths. Funny enough, when the season came out last February 2025, I was going through a similar thing that I call a pre-game to the much-awaited Saturn Return. For non-astrology girlies, it's the time during your late 20s to early 30s, where the biggest life-changing (or damaging) plot twists happen. I remember my favorite passage from the book Hope For the Flowers:
"How does one become a butterfly?" she asked pensively.
"You must want to fly so much that you are willing to give up being a caterpillar."
"You mean to die?" asked Yellow, remembering the three who fell out of the sky.
"Yes and No," he answered. "Looks like you will die but you will still live. Life is changed, not taken away. Isn't it that different from those who die without ever becoming butterflies?"
Severance, the return of Saturn, Hope for the Flowers, and obviously, the release of Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party prompted me to write this piece.
All I asked was a restart button, just like when you can restart your day when you fucked up in Stardew Valley and start over, like nothing happened but you know better this time. But no, I got a reset button⸻ where suddenly I wasn't sure if I really like the things I do, my skills regressed to zero, burnt out, and I don't know who I am. It felt like rock bottom suddenly revealed a stairway to the basement.
We all wanted to change our lives but when the real transformation comes in, it's fucking scary and disorienting, it really feels like dying. But on the bright side, this is the best opportunity to build my sense of self brick by brick⸻ starting with pursuing things that I really like, not because it makes sense to late-stage capitalist lens. It has to make sense to me first.
Another silver lining (question mark?), I stopped being a people-pleaser, I stopped masking, but at what cost? I also stopped being efficient, effective, and excellent⸻ things that measures your worth in the workplace or life, in general. It's like, all the skills and achievements I acquired are tied to people pleasing so when I stopped caring, the rest followed. It's always stop caring about what will people say. No one warned me about this side effect.
I didn't realize how burnt out I was until I ran out of care to give about what I do⸻ even if I'm passionate about it. They say when you're healing, or more self-aware in general, a rational thing to do is to take off the mask. Then finally go after the things that resonates and accommodate you, so you can save yourself from further sinking. But in this transformation, it wasn't easy. My cognitive capacity declined⸻ resulted from fatigue, dropping the mask that is responsible to keep me together, and screen rotting my brain.
Transformation is like life handed you an upgrade but you can't fully utilize that upgrade yet until you do the internal work. e.g., You just got a new fancy ultra-wide monitor but you can't use it yet until you replace your VGA cables into something compatible like DP or HDMI. My brain is rewiring but I can't use it yet as before because I need a major overhaul or reset. I need to re-learn everything at a pace that I can sustain, something that is no longer tied to people pleasing.
For our 6th anniversary, me and my partner spent the occasion in a wellness hotel in Batangas. I've never felt so serene until that weekend. I had a vision of life that I want: slow, has space for my hobbies and social life, a job that I'm just mildly passionate about that I'll only think of when I clock in, taking a step back to simple tech (a time when tech was still for the people), and finally get out of survival mode. Most of it can be achieved if I take the first step of hard reset aka quitting my job. I don't have safety nets so this is really huge for me. But I know when things are no longer working. Or, I've been in-denial for so long.
All these thoughts, running through my head while I clear my throat, unmute, and say "nothing on my end".