The Dissolving Self: How Mindfulness Opens Us to Better UX
"What we call ego is simply the mechanism our mind uses to resist life as it is."
― Adyashanti
When we first begin observing our minds through meditation practice, we discover something remarkable: what we thought of as our "self" - our preferences, judgments, and fixed ideas - is actually a constant stream of mental activity. This resistance creates a fundamental distortion in how we perceive reality, making it perhaps the greatest obstacle to genuine research and discovery.
As we learn to sit with this stream without getting caught in it, something profound happens: our grip on the personal self begins to loosen, creating space for genuine connection with others' experiences. We begin to see how our ego's constant resistance to what is - its preferences, aversions, and fixed ideas - has been subtly corrupting our observations and insights all along.
This same dissolution of the personal self is essential for meaningful UX work. @Darren Hood articulates this in a recent episode of his World of UX podcast: "If you're going to succeed at UX, UX isn't about you. It's not about me. It's about the whole. It's about the users. It's about the business. It's not about our personal preferences. And it's not about what benefits us at the individual level."
The ego - our habit of seeing everything through the lens of personal benefit or threat - creates barriers between ourselves and the people we aim to serve. And, as Hood emphasizes, it creates suffering—“the world of UX design has to be ego-free. And when you bring ego into this, somebody's gonna suffer. You, your team, your users, your customers, your stakeholders, your clients, somebody's gonna suffer, or everybody's gonna suffer."
What mindfulness practice helps to reveal is the nature of ego to resist reality, to overlay it with our personal story and preferences. When we're less identified with our personal thoughts and preferences, we naturally become more available to others' experiences and to reality as it is. We can sit with user frustrations without defensiveness. We can hear stakeholder concerns without reactivity. We can serve the larger process of creation and refinement without needing to prove our personal value.
This is the paradox: by releasing our attachment to individual preferences, we become capable of contributing to something far greater than ourselves. The dissolution of ego through mindfulness practice doesn't diminish us - it expands our capacity to serve, understand, and create meaningful change.
