Consciousness, Ego, and Inner Demons A Personal Reflection
- Studio Bas Architects
- Jan 18
- 5 min read
INTRODUCTION
Many times I feel the desire to be alone on an island with my wife. Just her and me. Far from the noise, the demands, the problems of the world. To forget everything. To live in a kind of permanent retreat. But I know that idea belongs more to the realm of utopia than to reality.
Life doesn’t work that way.
I want to start with something I consider fundamental: every person fights an internal battle with their own demons. Some are more visible, others more silent; some more ferocious, others more subtle. I have my own, and believe me, given how hard life has hit me at certain moments, they are not exactly kind.
Public Image vs. Reality
However, if you look at what I share publicly, you will mostly see a luminous version of me. Photography, nature, architecture, travel, exploration, knowledge. I am an amateur photographer, a lover of space, form, light, places, and ideas. I am deeply drawn to learning, observing, understanding. That is what I choose to share.
But showing that version does not mean that everything is always in order, nor that I live in a permanent state of happiness. Neither I nor anyone else lives that way. Happiness is not an absolute, continuous, or guaranteed state. Believing otherwise is a dangerous illusion.
Do not be deceived: happiness is not permanent for anyone. We all—absolutely all—struggle with our inner demons. And there is no moral hierarchy among them: mine is not greater than yours, nor yours smaller than mine. The difference lies not in the magnitude of the conflict, but in how each mind learns to relate to it. Resilience, self-control, reflection—that is where some demons are reduced, not because they disappear, but because they stop ruling us.
Consciousness and Being Conscious
This is where I want to enter more philosophical territory.
Are you conscious of your existence, or do you live from a pre-reflective consciousness? Jean-Paul Sartre argued that, for the most part, human beings live in this second state: we exist, feel, and act, but without stopping to deeply reflect on our own experience.
All living beings endowed with a nervous system possess consciousness in a basic sense: they feel pain, pleasure, cold, fear; they perceive sounds, images, stimuli. But in humans something different appears: the ability to reflect on experience itself. We do not only feel; we know that we feel. We do not only live; we can question the very fact of being alive.
Consciousness and being conscious are not exactly the same. Having experiences is consciousness. Becoming aware of them—observing them, questioning them—is being conscious.
And yet, most of the time, we live on autopilot.
Autopilot and the Ego
From the moment we are born, we are shaped by social, cultural, and symbolic structures that precede us. We learn what to think, how to behave, what to desire, what to fear. Over time, this mold becomes so familiar that we stop questioning it. In this way, we reduce our conscious state to a comfortable, predictable mental routine.
This is where the ego comes into play.
The ego is not an enemy. It is a necessary structure. It gives us identity, direction, desire, ambition, and a sense of continuity. Without ego, we would probably live an empty existence, without drive or purpose. Philosophy and psychology agree on this: the ego serves a vital function.
But it also has a darker side.
When the ego dominates the entire scene, it clouds our ability to be conscious. Everything revolves around the “I”: my ideas, my reasons, my beliefs, my truth. We believe we are always right. We stop listening. We stop questioning ourselves.
The result is a society with impressive technological development, but with a fragile evolutionary maturity. Advanced technologies in the hands of fragile egos, capable of destroying everything in order to preserve power, control, or superiority.
The Cosmic Perspective
To go deeper into this, I invite you to consider something uncomfortable, yet necessary.
In three or four generations, no one will remember you. Your name might remain, if you are lucky. An anecdote, a blurred image, a vague memory—unlikely. Do you know the name of your great-great-grandfather? Do you truly know who he was?
Now let’s expand the scale.
The observable universe is immense, almost impossible to imagine. In our galaxy alone, the Milky Way, there are between one hundred and four hundred billion stars. Estimates suggest that this number may be comparable to, or even greater than, the total number of grains of sand across all the beaches and deserts on Earth, when both are analyzed by orders of magnitude.
And if we expand the scale even further, the observable universe contains around two trillion galaxies. That is, there are more galaxies in the observable universe than stars in our own galaxy.
From that perspective, our lives mean nothing to the universe. Not even the human species, as a whole, represents anything relevant on a cosmic scale. The universe does not notice our existence, nor our absence. It will continue expanding with absolute indifference, whether or not a planet called Earth exists to harbor life.
This is not nihilism. It does not mean that nothing matters.
It means that meaning is not cosmic—it is human.
One Single Life
We have only one life. On average, about seventy-five years. A blink on a universal scale.
The question is inevitable: is it worth allowing our demons to be so large that we spend this single life in constant suffering?
I choose to share my happier version not because I deny my demons, but because I have learned to reduce their control over me. They are mine, and I do not want you to carry them. One thing is important to clarify: minimizing them does not mean they are small. It means they no longer direct my decisions.
Closing: An Inevitable Decision
Being conscious is not comfortable. It is not cheap spirituality or naïve positivism. Being conscious hurts, because it requires looking at yourself without excuses, without masks, without comforting narratives.
But there is something even harder than that: living an entire life without realizing that you are living it.
The universe owes you nothing. History owes you nothing. No one will remember you forever.
And precisely because of that, this life—yours—matters now.
Not because you are special on a cosmic scale, but because you are conscious of existing. And that consciousness forces a choice: to continue on autopilot, ruled by ego and demons, or to assume the responsibility of living awake.
You are breathing right now. You are here. That is real. Everything else is noise.
And in a life so brief, there is no more radical decision than choosing to live consciously.
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