Author Archives: elizab33

The Gift of Life

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After talking about death and how to cope with it for an entire quarter, I would say I am still just as scared about dying and the thought of death as I was prior to this class. However, I would say that I have a better understanding of how that fear motivates me as a member of a certain society to act in a certain way. Terror Management Theory was a concept that I struggled to come to terms with as someone who likes to see myself motivated by life, not death, but working through it with our class has made me appreciate my time and place on this earth in a different light.

            Working with my action project group to showcase people’s opinions about death and how they could be rationalized or explained by the work of Ernest Becker and related to experiments done in Worm at the Core on Terror Management Theory was a very grounding experience. We got to work with the material we spent so much time discussing in class while we debated economic impacts of globalization on climate change and the influence of sacrifice and gift giving on our relationships with facing death. It felt like creating a small piece of information about the enormous concepts of life and death that we covered all quarter.

The Gift of Life – a painting by Aditi Jha

            Absorbing information about what to do as an activist in the face of climate change was just as difficult as facing the idea of death multiple times a week. I felt like we spent so much time talk about the irreversible damage that human pollution has caused to the environment during a time when I personally have never felt more connected to earth. It forced me to reevaluate if I was appreciating my position as a human existing as part of the earth system and giving back to it, because loving to hike and ski isn’t saving it even if it makes me appreciate it. It was seeing the albatrosses, learning the meaning of Anthropocene, and discussing the effects of the Bolt Creek fire on Seattle when we had the worst air quality in the world.

            Even though I am one person, this quarter has helped me understand the gift of existing as a person on this planet for the short time that I am.

Personal Perspectives

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When I think of death, it is simply just a thought. When I try to imagine what it is like to be dead coupled with the fact that means one day I will cease to exist, I feel a pit develop in my stomach like I am going to pass out. It cosumes me with fear of the unknown and my breath quickens as my body cannot comprehend the thoughts of that experience. The anxiety that results is one that can disappear quickly with a distraction away from those thoughts.

Other anxieties that I harbor don’t leave as readily, and I often must focus on my breath or close my eyes to eliminate the closing in of my surroundings. This form of concentration on myself is something I have incorporated as fundamental to my existence, while the anxiety that comes with facing the fear of my death has not. The contemplative practices we have done in class this quarter while discussing reactions to mortality have helped me understand how to combine these practices.

The Double Secret is a surrealist painting done by Rene Magritte that is said to represent the confrontation of what lays beyond the human figure, including thoughts of death.

Contemplative practices forced me to shut out the distractions of the room and people around me and focus on the concepts of the course materials as we guided our breaths and tuned into the feelings of our bodies in the context of Terror Management Theory and death anxiety. I was more readily able to work through what had previously been feelings of dread when confronting death and move across perspectives.

The movement I prefer is within my own thoughts in mind through the stillness of my body in order to isolate my thoughts. When we engaged in a contemplative practice of moving within spaces that were shared with others, I found myself slipping into thoughts outside of the ones I was trying to center–invoking anxiety rather than escaping it. 

There is value within perspectives, especially in hearing and experiencing it with others. However, I believe that the contemplative practices allowed me to gain perspective within myself and confront ideas and feelings I would otherwise push down. The chaos of our world can distract us from our finitude but understanding that it will come and facing it has made me all the more ready for it.





Extinction is not Exclusive

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Grappling with the thought of death has shown to cause fear, and in Worm at the Core, it is argued that this fear we encounter greatly influences how people live their lives. When reminded of their mortality, Worm at the Core shows how people tend to make pronounced differences in their decisions and behaviors. With the threat of if the world can even sustain the next generation as a result of climate change, death anxiety may be more at the forefront of people’s minds than ever. 

Terror management theory cites culture and society as distractions from an inevitable end noting how religion provides a comfort of what awaits in life after death. But regardless of whether people worship a god or healthy lifestyles, one thing remains true: if we can’t save the planet from ourselves, there will be no more fear because humans won’t exist as a species anymore. I can’t help but wonder, how does the mass extinction of species around us due to climate change affect death anxiety as we are headed towards the same fate?

Three separate images from left to right of a blue macaw in a tree, a dodo bird, and a western black rhino sitting down in a field.

Three recently extinct species: blue macaw, dodo bird, and western black rhino.

This brings us to an article written by the New York Times, The 8 Million Species We Don’t Know, that details the rapid rate of extinction of so many species at the hands of humans despite not knowing 80% of those species that exist on our planet. The piece details a plan created by conservation scientists called the Half-Earth Project that aims to protect large areas of land and water on the planet, keeping them in their most natural state to protect species and the biodiversity they bring as foundational elements.

The Worm at the Core showcases that fear is a common sentiment when people are reminded of their mortality through terror management theory, but how are people affected when people are reminded that we are a species that can go extinct just like those in the NYT article? If people change their actions for fear of their own death, shouldn’t they change their actions to help save the disappearing species around us so that we may avoid that being our fate?

A manatee floating under clear blue green water above the sandy bottom.

To quote the last line of Worm at the Core, “By asking and answering these questions, we can perhaps enhance our own enjoyment of life, enrich the lives of those around us, and have a beneficial impact beyond it” (Solomon et al., 225).

Nature Is My Religion

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Recently, I have begun to see myself as a piece of the earth rather than a being separate from it. This is something I began to feel not only in thought but as part of my soul. From skiing pillows in remote British Columbia as snow dumped onto us for days, to watching seals cover themselves with sand for protection from the sun on the shores of the Redwood Forest, I began to truly believe that the God I worship is mother nature and my religion is the natural world we live in.

Clouds above a mountain peak over looking a frozen lake.

Summit of Alpental after 4 inches of fresh snowfall.

With this spiritual discovery came the painful awareness that the things I saw and experienced are in danger of disappearing or being irreversibly altered by the effects of global warming. Less rainfall means shallow streams and Salmon not being able to make it to spawning grounds, wildfires destroying thousands of acres causing ash to rain from the sky states away, and homes being brought out to sea by extreme hurricanes doesn’t even begin to describe the effects that climate change has had on our planet. 

So, I took this class. Because how can I see the earth as my mother without understanding how to grasp my own mortality as humans continue to kill it? Can we save it? If I ride my bike and take short showers, does that manage the terror I feel for the future?

Sunlight breaking through fog over the trees on the shore of a beach covered in large mossy rocks.

Early morning where the freshwater river enters the oceans on the California coast in the Redwoods National Forest.

In class, we talked about systems theory in the context of understanding that we are living in the world rather than on it. I resonated a lot with this because it forces people to see something as a makeup of parts and how those parts function together to make a whole. Which is what the Earth is and how we participate in that system.

However, I think that it is important to see the interconnectedness of everything that works together to create the environment we live in, but Deep Adaptations provides a pessimistic view of climate change that not only seems to perpetuate an idea that the Earth cannot be saved from the harm that has been caused to it. This seems to embody the extremes of terror management theory that we have discussed in class and come to understand through various educational materials that show the extremes resulting from being reminded of our own mortality. In this case, the extreme of believing there is no reason to have hope.

Sources and References:

https://www.npr.org/2019/09/13/760599683/were-all-gonna-die-how-fear-of-death-drives-our-behavior

lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf

youtube.com/watch