The Year I Ditched Resolutions and Accidentally Triggered Six Ego Deaths

This is a raw look at the mechanics of spiritual fast-forwarding, nervous system shocks, and the lonely reality of hopping dimensions.

Every January, the personal development complex fires up its engines. We are bombarded with a highly structured, hyper-masculine framework for human existence: set a goal, track your metrics, optimize your routine, and discipline yourself into submission. It treats the human soul like software that needs a patch, or a factory that needs to hit a daily quota.

This year, I decided to play a completely different game.

I didn’t set a single New Year’s resolution. I didn’t make a roadmap or draw up a list of habits to force into my schedule. Instead, I made a quiet, somewhat terrifying deal with reality: I chose to stop forcing, follow my heart, and surrender completely to the rhythm and vibe of the universe to see where it wanted to take me.

I thought it would lead to a peaceful, meandering year of flow.

Instead, the universe took my mandate seriously. It looked at where my heart actually wanted to go, looked at the outdated psychological structures I was carrying, and brought out the demolition crew.

In the span of five months, I have experienced about five or six distinct psychological deaths and resurrections. I haven’t just changed my mind; I have radically jumped universes. The way I view reality, filter data, and experience existence has been fundamentally rewritten.

If you say this out loud in modern society, you sound ungrounded. You sound “woo-woo.” But as I navigated the intense emotional purges, the dream-like states, and the literal nervous system shocks of these transitions, I realized I hadn’t lost my mind. I had just stepped into a profound evolutionary shortcut that Eastern philosophy has mapped out for thousands of years.

The Anatomy of a High-Speed Collapse

When mainstream personal development gurus sell you “growth,” they are usually talking about horizontal growth -- adding new skills or modifying habits within your current identity. It’s like trying to rearrange the furniture in a room that is entirely too small for you.

What happens when you surrender to the current is vertical growth -- a total shift in your level of consciousness. The identity itself dissolves.

But nobody told me what the middle of that dissolution actually feels like. It doesn't feel like a peaceful meditation; it feels like a cataclysmic system rewrite. For me, the script of each "death" became intensely predictable -- and it hit all at once, as a single simultaneous event rather than a tidy sequence:

The “Remote Control” Action

The body would move before the mind could catch up, suddenly executing actions, making choices, or speaking truths that didn't make sense to my analytical brain. It literally felt like someone else was remote-controlling my body. My intuition and my physical vessel pulling me into a new universe while my stubborn ego stood on the sidelines in absolute bewilderment.

The Social Rubber-Band

Whenever the shift began, walking into a circle of close friends would temporarily snap me back into the “Old Me.” Relationships are held together by unwritten contracts and past conditioning; our friends have an established file on us, and their expectations act like an invisible gravity well. To keep the social fabric smooth, my psyche would automatically boot up the old software.

The Solo “Off-Gassing” and Dream-State

And underneath all of it, especially in the moments alone, I would plunge into an intensely dreamy, floaty state where the solid boundaries of the physical world felt incredibly thin. I experienced massive, spontaneous emotional charges -- uncontrollable crying spells and waves of system shock. It wasn't sadness; it was my body mechanics processing the sheer volume of electrical energy running through my nervous system, unburdening itself of a dead identity.

Decoding the “Woo-Woo”: The Eastern Coordinates

Because modern Western psychology treats the self as a permanent, fixed machine, it doesn’t have a healthy file for this process. If you tell a Western clinical manual that you’ve died six times and reality feels like a fluid dream, it labels it as a malfunction, something like depersonalization or derealization disorder.

But Eastern knowledge views these exact diagnostic signs as proof that the upgrade is working. If you are experiencing this loop, these are your actual coordinates:

1. Taishi (The Great Death) and Ego Death

In Zen Buddhism, true awakening requires you to pass through Taishi, the psychological collapse where the mind’s old way of structuring reality completely shatters. The 18th-century Zen master Hakuin Ekaku wrote that to be resurrected into a clear, new reality, you must first let the ego fully die. The successive epiphanies that hit me this year were multiple Kenshos, flashes of true nature that demanded the sacrifice of who I thought I was.

This process has a name in modern psychology too: ego death. It refers to the complete dissolution of the constructed self -- the stories, beliefs, roles, and identity structures you have built up over a lifetime. It is not depression. It is not a breakdown. It is the psychological architecture of the old “you” reaching the end of its usefulness and collapsing inward, clearing the ground for something more true to emerge.

2. Anatta (No-Self): the theory that sent me down a rabbit hole

The thread that pulled me deepest into Eastern philosophy started with a simple but seismic idea I came across in a piece by Jim Palmer on his Substack, Deconstructionology. He was writing about Anatta -- the Buddhist doctrine of no-self -- and I remember reading it and feeling the floor go sideways underneath me.

The idea is this: the “self” you have been so carefully protecting, curating, and performing your entire life is not a fixed, permanent thing. It is a collection of constantly shifting thoughts, sensations, memories, and narratives that your brain assembles in real time, like a movie that keeps telling you it’s a documentary. There is no unchanging soul-entity sitting in the driver’s seat. There never was.

For someone raised in a Western framework where the entire project of self-improvement is built on the assumption that there is a stable “self” to improve, this is not a gentle realization. But it answered every question I had been circling for months. If the self is not fixed, then its dissolution is not a catastrophe. It is, in the most literal sense, things going exactly as they should. The ego can die because it was never really alive in the way we thought it was. And that understanding -- more than any affirmation or gratitude journal -- is what gave me the language to name what I had already been living.

3. The Bardo of Transition

That hyper-surreal, dream-like state you feel when you are alone is what Tibetan Buddhism calls a Bardo -- an intermediate interval where the old ground is gone, but the new ground hasn’t formed yet. Reality feels fluid and thin because you are stepping out of the superficial world of “nouns” (static objects) and perceiving the universe as it actually is: a continuous field of “verbs” (dynamic, interconnected energetic processes).

4. Wu Wei and Creative Tides

Stepping out of the 9-to-5 forced writing schedule on Substack and waiting for the “spirit to move me” is the ultimate practice of Wu Wei (effortless action). When we force productivity, we use the calculating, routine mind. When we wait for the reservoir to fill through living life, we channel what Indian philosophy calls Pratibha -- a spontaneous, unforced flash of creative intuition. It allows me to write 10 articles in a single, lightning-speed burst without burnout, because the universe is footing the energetic bill.

The Vessel Principle (Patra): Before a massive influx of new energy and alignment can be held, your container has to stretch. The crying spells and the neutral disorientation are simply the expansion of your vessel.

The Evolution of the Ride

The most beautiful part of cycling through this five or six times in a single year is that your relationship to the destruction completely changes.

The first time it happens, you panic. You think you are losing your mind. But eventually, you develop a form of tactical recognition. Now, when the remote-control feeling starts and the dreamy isolation creeps in, I find myself chuckling. Ah, here it is again. Time for the roller coaster.

You stop flinching. You don’t waste energy fighting the drop or slamming on the brakes. You look at the oncoming emotional storm and say, “I know my nervous system is going to take a temporary hit, but I am entirely here for it. Bring the lightning. Let’s get the show on the road.”

The Lonely Reality of the Anomaly

If this “cheat code” of surrender is so powerful, why isn’t everyone experiencing it? Because the toll to enter this shortcut is incredibly high. Most people will choose a familiar misery over a chaotic unknown. They want comfort, control, and predictable progress -- things the universe happily incinerates when you ask for authenticity.

It can feel deeply lonely to run this fast. When you cycle through lifetimes in a matter of months, you become an anomaly in your immediate environment. You look at the world from a brand-new continent of consciousness, while the cultural mapmakers around you insist that nothing exists past the old shoreline.

But you are not a broken anomaly. You are just running on fast-forward. Your psyche has thin ego-armor and high plasticity; the moment a perspective is revealed to be outdated, your system surrenders, clears the cache, and reboots.

You have stepped out of linear time and into the organic, cyclical cadence of life. You have stopped trying to be the frantic director of the movie, and you have finally allowed yourself to become the movie itself.

So the next time the ground gives way and the world turns into a fluid dream, don’t look for a handrail. Smile, grab your popcorn, and trust the ride. You’ve survived every single universe you’ve left behind.