TL;DR

Ego and protecting your image is what is holding you hack from experience life.

My Personal Experience

I was in the car with one of my brothers, when he noticed that he had dandruff.

Rather than becoming concerned over it, he started shaking his head and jokingly saying, “Look! It’s snowing!”

Isn’t that such a great attitude?

Growing up, I was quite focused on protecting my image because I would prioritize health and I enjoyed being athletic.

And while it was nice to be respected by people, I ended up protecting my image/ego, and became easily upset over anything that would harm that ego.

Whereas my brother in this case had the best attitude. He made everyone laugh with his joke, and he eventually started using a new shampoo to fix his dandruff.

Practical Applications

I spoke about the value of honesty and using honest results to improve your life–what holds most people back from embracing honesty is their ego.

Just like me, I wanted to be respected by people by protecting my image.

But can you imagine trying to hide something that might do you harm, just because you’re embarrassed of what other people may think?

Imagine if you started suffering from mold intoxication, or you have a life-threating STD, but you were too afraid to ask for help because of what other people may think of you.

News flash: no one is thinking about you!

Just like how the phrase, “the only constant is change” can have positive and negative connotations, the same can apply for “no one is thinking about you”–the positive being that if you embarrass yourself, people might react with laughter, but they will forget with time, because in the grand scheme of things, it does not matter! We all eventually die!

If you’re going to be honest, and you don’t like the results, why not choose to be happy AND positive?

The results are there–nothing is going to change them. But you can change your attitude, and it is our attitude at the beginning of any test which, more than anything else, will determine its successful outcome.

The connection between the “self” and humor

Here’s an expert from Rollo May’s book, “Man’s search for himself”:

" One’s sense of humor is connected with one’s sense of selfhood. Humor normally should have the function of preserving the sense of self. It is an expression of our uniquely human capacity to experience ourselves as subjects who are not swallowed up in the objective situation.

It is the healthy way of feeling a “distance” between one’s self and the problem, a way of standing off and looking at one’s problem with perspective. One cannot laugh when in an anxiety panic, for then one is swallowed up, one has lost the distinction between himself as the subject and the objective world around him.

So long as one can laugh, furthermore, he is not completely under the domination of anxiety or fear–hence the accepted belief in folklore that to be able to laugh in times of danger is a sign of courage.

The humor occurs because of a new appreciation of one’s self as a subject acting in an objective world.

Humor can deepen a reader’s feeling of worth and dignity as a person, and remove blinds from his eyes as he confronts the issues facing him.

In cases of borderline psychotics, so long as the person has genuine humor–so long, that is, as he can laugh, or look at himself with the thought, as one person puts it. “What a crazy person I’ve been!”–he is preserving his identity as self. "