Are We Protecting Our Self Identity?

Why do we so protect our concept of self, this avatar thing? I mean, youv are experienced meditators. And i'm disosed taking notes, as you spoke, because i love all that. Ye, we might not even know what it is consciously that we're protecting, but we're protecting something. It could have been multiple hits, so to speak,. where it might be a bunch of likes on an instagram or twitter... We think, oh, people like what i have to say. So then that becomes part of this composite of this self that we start defending. Same process, it just gets applied to something else. You can see how this can happen all