#capt. kirk

I've always liked Capt. Kirk of Star Trek quite a lot.  And in thinking about it, I doubt very much that his character as such would have turned out as good as it did without William Shatner's large ego to have helped both create and drive Capt. Kirk's personality.  So seeing someone with a large ego doesn't really bother me personally, and it instead seems to help them become more creative and successful.  And yet some people don't seem to really like people with large egos, and I'm not exactly clear on why such a thing should bother them so much.  It's really rather hard to separate feeling high confidence from having a large ego, yet people are generally attracted to other people who exhibit high confidence.  So why should there sometimes be felt a distinction between ego and confidence?  And what about pride as well?  It would be very hard to have either/both high confidence and pride and yet not have a large ego as well, being that we all cannot help but to observe ourselves and have feelings regarding ourselves just the same as we usually feel toward other people as well.  In other words, we not only positively and negatively judge other people, we do this perhaps even more so toward ourselves as well.  A confident person does something well and then feels pleased with themselves concerning their accomplishment, being that they simply cannot help but to feel this way because of it being human nature.  And then this in turn leads eventually to pride, causing the person to feel proud of themselves because of their many accomplishments.  And this all helps naturally to reinforce their ego regarding themselves.  They simply can't help but to feel that as a result of their accomplishments, they deserve some degree of respect and/or at least acknowledgement, even though this felt condition of respect for themselves from others isn't typically really the reason that they had done the things that they had done.  And yet this nevertheless seems to still bother some people...that others might feel that they should be respected for their accomplishments.  And when the person doesn't feel adequately respected for such accomplishments, they can often develop a passive-aggressive type of behavior of sounding like they are bragging about their accomplishments, when in fact they are more simply trying to remind others that they do in fact deserve some respect and acknowledgement concerning whatever their field of accomplishment has been.  And when this condition isn't changed, their passive-aggressive behavior of this nature can come off sounding both like they are bragging as well as that they have a larger ego then they probably actually do...as a kind of self-defense mechanism.  So it's the lack of respect and acknowledgement regarding their field of accomplishments that drives such a condition, then, as more of a self-defensive type of reaction to their environment of the people who surround them.  So does this mean that such people need their egos "stroked" in order to feel satisfied?  Perhaps this is true to some degree, being that we are all only "human" and as such experience various feelings that we certainly don't INTENTIONALLY create within ourselves...with their simply being there as part of our physical nature that do not go away.

As for me personally, concerning the field of computers and especially computer programming, I definitely have come to fit within all of the above conditions.  Whether bad or good, I seem to have had no choice in the matter.  And I think that this tends to bother some people concerning me, just as some people don't actually like William Shatner either, very much, due to his large ego.  But I wonder what drives some people to be attracted to others with large egos, and yet others to feel that such people bother them?  And I am talking psychologically here.  What would make a person having a big ego bother someone who happens to observe them as being this way?  Could it be that they have low self-esteem, which therefore makes them feel a certain type of hatred toward those who don't have low self-esteem...kind of an internal form of jealousy of some sort?  In any case, just because some people don't like other people who happen to have bigger egos, it doesn't mean that those people with the bigger egos are actually bad people or that they have done anything wrong.  In fact, I think that big egos simply springs from pride...a pride that comes on its own accord simply due to both their past as well as ongoing accomplishments.