What you do is to conceal or repress the problem. Then you don't see that you have grown worse and failed to recognize the silly things you did to cover up, escape and find comfort. When you did not cover up, then you compensated. 

You became a show-off or an extrovert, vying for the attention that made you feel secure.

Perhaps you made fun of yourself, embellishing the stupid things you were compelled to do and say. You made others laugh while you played the fool, so that through your entertainment people would find distraction from their own stupidity and foolishness. 

Then they would "like" you and you would like yourself more! A fool can't stop being a fool, an idiot can't stop his idiocy, and people are driven to continue being entertaining and "popular."

This is not to imply that we should be unfriendly and never make jokes. What I am saying is that we must be careful not to use friends, food, sex or pleasures for ego assurance. This is the real, and usually unrecognized, danger!

There is a right and a wrong way to relate to everything, including pet animals, flowers, birds and trees. You must never, NEVER seek assurances through them, or you will become anxious, guilty and egocentric. 

Indeed, while you are high on your food, sex, flowers, dogs and cats—like dope addicts—you may never find out how stupid and decrepit you are!

Many people have died not only from overeating but also from the sickness of not being able to eat at all. We suffer from having too many friends or being afraid to have any friends at all. From too much to too little—and many of nature's Flower Children are now digging up daisies!

When we lose ourselves in nature, food, sex, friends or what have you, or when we use them to feel "beautiful," we incur such guilt and physical deterioration that we become sick. 

Yet we are often oblivious to the cause because we do not see our pleasures as the basis; and so we will continue to eat to cure the misery of wrong eating, or use sex to alleviate the pain of sexuality.

Whatever we may be, whether thief, glutton, Casanova or a shy wallflower, we temporarily lose self-consciousness when we are accepted. Inadequacy only appears again when we stop striving to make ourselves adequate. 

"A fool can't stop being a fool, an idiot can't stop his idiocy, and people are driven to continue being entertaining and "popular."

We stimulate our senses to increase the sexual or sensual powers, so as to make them stronger than our doubts about them.

You try to prove you are more of a man or woman by doing things that make you feel more masculine or feminine. Instead, every experience tends to prove otherwise. To maintain feelings of adequacy, you are obliged to redouble your efforts to prove yourself. 

But later, you are always assailed by feelings of even greater doubt.

The uncertain female ego will make herself more alluring so as to stir the brute in man. Because of his attention and applause, as well as his repressed lust, she is stimulated to feel more beautiful and feminine.

Through her ego need, she excites a man to feel more masculine, but he merely becomes less than a man. So the growing inadequacy of the male ego continues, demanding her to play the female temptress so he can continue thinking that the intensified feeling of maleness he experiences is indeed manhood.

In reality he is becoming weaker, more of an animal, and dependent on her!

Hunting, fishing and athletics tend to emphasize masculine brutishness, so that men are more attractive to the ladies. Men strive to be better brutes as though that made them better men. 

We are inclined to believe that being more masculine or feminine is being more of a person—but that is not true! It is a trick resulting in greater futility. Here again the "cure" is the cause of greater inadequacy, self-consciousness and loss of self-confidence.

More sex, more food, more medicine, drugs and drink, more beautiful surroundings, more muscle—these things we strive for. And if we find out or sense what these surpluses do to us before they kill us, then we react by cutting them off and having nothing at all. And that kills us just as surely.

We eat to feel good and dress to look good. We involve ourselves with everything in a way that helps us feel and believe we are better. What happens is that we become more anxious about the identity we have adopted.