EGO, is the self-constructed false hope of permanency, our vain and chimerical search for immortality. It appears as attachment to manifestations and objects which have no intrinsic reality or permanence.
Oriental philosophy terms this as spiritual and cultural "ignorance".
Consigning the concept of "here and now" as a quality too "narrow" for considerations of human destiny is a false viewpoint constructed by the ego. Fundamentally, the here and now is the only reality. The past is gone, and the future is totally uncertain.
Living in the now, interconnected with everyone and everything in the universal continuum, is a happier alternative.
Check out Oriental philosophical and psychological secular teachings. They offer true happiness and spiritual peace not found in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic cosmos.
Aristotle and Eastern wisemen identified the search for happiness as man's pre-eminent goal. Western civilization seems to have answered this search by settling on the nostrum of material progress.
In doing that it has missed the mark. There is no peace or surcease from ego-satisfaction which creates only relentless hunger for more of the same.
