Engaging with Worm at the Core this past week has been insightful and sobering, yet surprisingly fascinating. The book’s main thesis about how our uniquely human fear of death acts as the primary force that drives human activity wouldn’t seem to make sense at first, but Worm at the Core nevertheless makes a compelling argument about our relationship with death as well as implications for many of our current institutions. In particular, the book argues that our cultures and institutions exist to subvert mortality and to give ourselves a bigger purpose to ease our anxiety about death.

Table of Harvard Youth Poll Responses.

Worm at the Core postulates that people strive to be a part of an enduring culture, as it ties us with the past as well as the future. This allows to achieve a sort of “symbolic immortality” as people would persist for as long as the culture does. For me, achieving symbolic immortality can be fulfilling to us as it gives us a greater purpose. Contributing and being a part of something that has been there long before me and long after me is so powerful. Conversely, this may suggest that cultural breakdown or transitions in states of the world may leave people feeling purposeless and immensely anxious. In the context of the Anthropocene and our current issues, I suspect that this cultural erosion is happening rapidly.

A relatively recent Harvard study revealed that 51% of young Americans (age 18-29) reported feeling down, depressed, and even hopeless, and 28% reported having suicidal or self-harming thoughts. With political polarization increasing in the US, the ongoing climate change crisis, the pandemic, and other social issues in the foreground of our minds, many political, cultural, and economic institutions are being scrutinized as well as revolutionized. This continuous, sustained existential dread we are facing has in part, in my view, been driven by this cultural/institutional erosion. We can no longer hide behind the guise of what has worked or existed, and we must face reality–something that may make us feel purposeless or a perhaps even a sense of indifference. We may believe that because Anthropocene processes may mean that nothing as we know will exist, life itself is meaningless. However, I think that if we were to reorient our paradigms to contemplate this drastic cultural change, we can effectively manage our anxieties and create a better, more meaningful future for ourselves.