I fail to grasp the car/ego thing and often wonder what it replaces in people’s lives?
I’d imagine it’s the same thing that coffee gives you in yours. When folk realise that they’re not really the special snowflake their parents always told them they were and they are in fact (as part of a western industrialised society at least) going to live an uninteresting unremarkable life that will be largely (given the history of humanity) long lived and luxurious, they’ll get a bit depressed, and in a bid to overcome that, they’ll grab at something that they think will sooth it.
For a lot of folk that try not to think too hard that will be materialistic goods, hoping, against evidence, that it will make them happy.
Or they’ll get existential angst…