A rocket launch is hard not to laugh at. The engineering is insane. The shape is not exactly subtle. The billionaire smiles. The crowd cheers. Humanity points a giant status symbol at the sky and calls it the future.
I am not claiming ego is the only ingredient. Curiosity, obsession, craft, and the need to drag an inner vision into the physical world are all real. Ego still seems to be firmly in the mixture, especially when a private drive grows enormous and asks the world to watch.
Remove the titles, stories, and tailored clothes and there we are: nervous wiring with excellent PR.
Putting the thing into the world is not automatically ego either. Communication is a drive of its own. Ego climbs in somewhere around: I should be the one to do this. And the world should know. It attaches itself to curiosity, vision, craft, and hunger. Definitely not the whole fuel. It does look like one hell of an accelerant.
And the annoying part is that it works. Ten years of failure, debt, mockery, hiring, firing, bugs, lawsuits, physics, and public embarrassment require someone to keep going long after stopping would look perfectly reasonable. Ego probably helps.
Pyramids mixed engineering, religion, power, and ego into stone. Rockets mix physics, curiosity, capital, and ego into combustion. Startups do something similar with payroll. Human motives rarely arrive one at a time.
Ego also makes retreat expensive. Once the mission and the self become the same thing, changing course feels like dying. A mission becomes a cult. A theory becomes identity. A flag becomes permission.
People do not only kill for resources. They kill for stories. For status. For humiliation. For symbols. For being right. For some imaginary line that suddenly becomes more important than actual breathing humans.
Then you zoom out and the joke gets worse. Earth is tiny. The Milky Way does not care about our pitch decks, wars, valuations, arguments, promotions, followers, or genius theories.
While this should probably make us somewhat humble, it mostly does not.
The idea of killing ego does not convince me. It sounds like something people say before creating a new ego around having no ego.
For better or worse, I am beginning to suspect that some ego is necessary for human growth. But zoom out far enough and all of human history looks like an amoeba crossing a petri dish with an attitude.