Author Archives: Sofia Leotta

Death Anxiety as a Barrier to Climate Action

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Death acceptance is a valuable tool for building a more sustainable future. If humans overcome death anxiety, prioritizing natural systems and far out goals for the future become easier. This is because environmental movements often deal with long time frames and forward-thinking. Terror Management Theory suggests that humans intrinsically avoid death reminders. How can we think about climate change without envisioning a world in which we don’t exist? Thinking critically about sustainability means thinking beyond our own lifespans. 

In daily life, humans don’t often choose to think outside of our 100 years. Even though, geologically, 100 years is practically insignificant, our lifespan feels long and monumental. To think beyond 100 years is to perceive mortality. Humans disregard sustainability because it forces them to contemplate their own mortality. To live for the future is to acknowledge that you are acting to benefit a future that does not include you. Sustainability is hard because we don’t want to think about that. 

My experiences during our group’s action project directly counters this fear of mortality. By having conversations with people I normally wouldn’t speak to about death, as interviews for our video project, I opened the conversation to denial of death, personal beliefs, and our collective fears of the idea of not existing one day. What initially seemed like a rough conversation quickly began to ease my uncertainty and helped me form stronger bonds with the people I interviewed. 

While death anxiety may encourage us to limit our thinking in terms of sustainability, conversations about death give us room to process our emotions without falling into the false belief that we’re alone in our thinking. As we learned through Terror Management Theory and in this course, humans seem to internalize fears of death in similar ways. Discussing death directly addresses the elephant in the room. I found that after having a conversation about death, rather than spiraling in my mind, I was less adverse to thinking about large-scale worldly issues, like climate change. 

Death conversations increase humanity’s tolerance to mortality as a whole–a state we must reach to survive. We are mortal beings. Denying this drives us to ignore a future without us. Throughout history people even like to feel like they’re “building a better future” for next generations. To accept death is to open conversations about planet Earth in the coming centuries and prioritize protecting our natural resources for future generations. 

Contemplative Practices Ease Existential Anxiety

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Perhaps the best place to look at Terror Management Theory on a personal scale isn’t in the worldly examples we talk about in class, but rather in our class environment itself. Whether we’re talking about mortality directly or circling around it through conversation of climate change and world strife, one could argue that our class content serves as a continuous series of death reminders. 

What’s the result? Well, we see it every class session. People strongly assert their values, speak with fervor, and often try to sway others to their own beliefs. This isn’t a bad thing – it simply means that the role of contemplative practices is especially crucial and has the potential to have a great impact.

Contemplative practices break open an environment full of seemingly-endless existential pondering. During our first practice, after a class period that overwhelmed me in ways my calculus and biology classes never have, I let myself simply let go of an obsession with thoughts. I treated them like clouds moving across the sky and found a peace that I often lose when engaging in difficult conversations. 

When we spend so much time thinking and talking about death in our class, contemplative practices offer a time to decompress. It feels like a reversal as we move from brain to body. Contemplative practices ground me. When life’s larger questions and existential dread become too much, our class contemplative practices give me the space to focus on my body rather than my thoughts. 

For some people, perhaps the practices are about an appreciation of the mind, thoughts, and thinking. I personally find the most peace when I let my mind do what it wants and focus rather on the physical space I occupy in the world. We spend most of our class time leaning into our thoughts and thinking deeply about the world. Then through contemplative practices we’re away from the structured, analytical thinking we bring to class discussions. I feel my presence in our classroom and always am in a better mental state to connect with my classmates afterwards.

Contemplative practices ease the jarring effects of death reminders. In practices, I don’t feel the pressure to prove my world views and cling to social beliefs, but rather a sense of stillness in appreciating my presence in our world. I’m not pessimistic about the future or fighting against an overwhelming sea of issues. For a precious moment, life is as it is. 

 

Pondering death can make or break society

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Thinking more deeply about death has shocked me out of my daily rhythm. In some moments I’ve wished I was more religious as a way to “beat” the fear of death by utter belief in something else. The Worm at the Core tested me – it made me think, how is grappling with death culturally beneficial? Is finding my way through intense existential thoughts going to build me into a better person, or only blur my focus of reality more? 

A holistic and healthy relationship with death, rather than blind ignorance and avoidance, is the path I want to take. In The Worm at the Core’s “Living with Death” section, the authors propose that “being mortal, while terrifying, can also make our lives sublime by infusing us with courage, compassion, and concern for future generations.” (225) I strive to find this.

Sometimes the idea that I’m going to die one day doesn’t scare me though, but rather gives me a sense of nonchalance and indifference, which can often be equally damaging as fear of death. Climate change seems too overwhelming? Many of the repercussions will be hundreds of years from now, it’s not worth stressing about! Might as well give in to consumerism, it’s the path laid out for me!  

This is a coping mechanism that I believe many people, especially from industrialized consumer cultures hold. They warp fear of death into destructive acceptance and use the idea that they’re going to die at some point to justify overuse that sets future generations up for failure. 

Purposeful thinking about death that The Worm at the Core describes provides a different outlook. Everyone needs to grapple with death in their own way, but understanding death as a cyclical continuation of humanity lessens the fear for me. For more people to come after us and experience the joy and beauty of Earth, we all must die. Not die with the intention of draining all of the resources we want to experience before our own mortality – die with the intention of leaving room for a new generation of people. 

I want future generations of children to marvel at trees – to walk through forests with soil staining their feet and adore waterfalls, to see the remarkable diversity of animals in our world, and to gain joy from the things we take for granted. We will die, but our legacy and “immortality project” lies in preserving this remarkable place we call home. 

Possessions After Death

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I despise unread emails — that little number in the corner of my screen taunts me, tallying up missed messages until I inevitably open my emails sooner than I need to. But what about when I die? My habits will be abandoned and promotional emails will pile up in my accounts year after year.

Emails only scratch the surface of what will be left behind. Tubes of chapstick half used. Shampoo bottles 3/4 empty. Torn shoes. Belongings that will be passed to family members, until sentimentality hardens into practicality, and my formerly-essential yet obsolete items end up in landfills. Death goes against the systemic way we move through life in the Anthropocene. We create permanent systems to manage the complexity of our temporary lives. The impact of death on such an individualized, capitalist society is startling.

Sara Schley’s “Sustainability: The Inner and Outer Work” touches on the interconnectedness of life that our modern society disregards. In other species’ ecosystems, sustainability is necessary for survival. Everything that an individual doesn’t use will be used by another, from habitats to food. No species on Earth accumulates individual items like humans do. In the Anthropocene, we know of our death but turn a blind eye and reject nature’s circular economy.

I’m in this class because cycles of human life and death intrigue me. What does it mean to live in a world where, #1, our objects outlive us and, #2, our modernization doesn’t force us to repurpose every item (yet)? I’m here for personal reasons as well. Death doesn’t scare me so much as the complexity of existing and the unknowns in our world. Why are we here? Why am I a conscious being, experiencing life? Why don’t we talk about how insane life is? Does anyone else feel this way?

Image from “history of the entire world, i guess” – Bill Wurtz

Logically I know the science behind life, but the absurdity of it all rattles me. I hope this class will bring me some comfort and appreciation for the unknowable. There’s a positive side to thinking deeply that I wish to find.

In the meantime, when life feels a little too large, I turn to two vastly different pieces of media. “history of the entire world, i guess” is your classic quick history piece that reassures me of the science behind complexity in our modern world. On the contrary, “The Only Reason We’re Alive” is a spoken-word piece that could tug anyone’s emotions in the right ways. It’s ok that we don’t know all the answers – we know and can feel the most important parts of life. Now how can we use that knowledge to live and die in a more circular, sustainable way?

 

Media & Citations

billwurtz. “History of the Entire World, I Guess.” YouTube, YouTube, 10 May 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuCn8ux2gbs.

INQonline. “The Only Reason We’re Alive | Spoken Word Poet in-Q.” YouTube, YouTube, 10 Feb. 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ms7wQI_Q5iU.

Schley, Sara. “Sustainability: The Inner and Outer Work.” The Systems Thinker, 14 Mar. 2018, https://thesystemsthinker.com/sustainability-the-inner-and-outer-work/.