Category Archives: Denial

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.

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. 

What Did I Learn This Quarter?

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While my action project experience in this class could have been better, I am able to recognize the valuable lessons I learned from it – primarily about the importance of having a group leader. If we had one person taking charge, I think we could have gotten a lot more done. Regardless, I am proud of how we came together in the end to create engaging and informative content, despite our busy schedules.

In the context of our class, I found that our project, promoting the passage of legislation aimed to revolutionize plastic recycling in Washington, perfectly represents political ecology. We live in a system where we elect individuals to make environmental policy decisions on our behalf, and this recycling bill relies on them to pass it. I don’t want to say that my group’s action project was worthless (because I think there is a lot of value in public education), but we should acknowledge that a social media campaign will likely have a limited impact on the decisions made in Olympia.

Honestly, that is the reality of political ecology in the Anthropocene.

As far as the other action projects, WashPIRG’s Save the Orcas campaign was what finally allowed me to understand what our class was about. I could see that, like my group’s, theirs hinged on the actions of legislators, and that Senator Cantwell’s refusal to support breaching the dams might be motivated in some way by her fear of dying. Relatedly, the Ernest Becker group was contributing to the study of conceptions of death, which is beneficial in helping us to predict whether future environmental reforms might be possible in the face of climate disaster, given that Terror Management Theory explains our actions in response to death reminders. As this group mentioned in class, they were frustrated at the constraints they were given by the people in power over them, which is exactly what the ICA is for. This last group’s action project was directly investigating the political ecology of UW in the Anthropocene and trying to get our Board of Regents to follow through on their fossil fuel divestment commitments, again relying on people in power.

All in all, while it wasn’t my own group’s action project that led to me discovering the true meaning of our class, it was the action projects of our class in general that helped me to understand what it means to survive the political ecology of death in the Anthropocene.

How then shall I live?

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My major takeaway from this course regards how I want to proceed with living my life.

We have learned that death anxiety rules our lives and decisions, and that we cope through various forms of terror management. This constant fear drives our species to war, industrialization, colonization, exploitation, and now to the brink of a planetary climate disaster.

One of our contemplative practices asked us to consider three mindsets. Where 1) the world is generally getting worse, 2) the world is generally getting better, and 3) the world is how it is. I find the 3rd mindset to be the most realistic and empowering. In this view, we see the world as it is without sugarcoating it or focusing purely on evils. In this view, humanity has agency. We can sit back and continue our trajectory toward a terrible future, or we can choose to collaborate, innovate, and save our species from collapse.

With this mindset of agency, I am struck by the question: “how then shall I live?”

I need to start with my forms of terror management. Before this course, my management consisted of spree online shopping to fill a non-existent gap in my life and constant distractions because silence allowed intrusive thoughts to run rampant. These are unsustainable strategies.

Professor Jem Bendall in his video about Deep Adaptation asks viewers to cherish what they have. To enjoy life in the short time that we have it. Though I talk about why I dislike Bendall’s perspective in another blog post, I have come to accept this concept when taken alongside the strategies presented in Active Hope, the relief and fulfillment of volunteer work like my action project for WashPIRG’s Save the Orcas, and the hope that humanity still has agency to change.

Image Credit: Syracuse Peace Council

To answer the question “how then shall I live?,” I must adjust my terror management. Rather than needlessly consuming, I can focus on being grateful for what I already have. Rather than constantly distracting myself, I can spend more meaningful time with friends and family to feel reassured that I have people I care about who also care about me. I can take part in local efforts that better my community and environment. I can make changes like being better about recycling and using my purchasing power to favor local, sustainable businesses. I can choose to live with hope.

There are easily implementable things I can do to live a more conscientious and sustainable life without drastically changing my lifestyle. I don’t know if this is enough, but I hope that between collective individual action, death anxiety harnessed by corporate inventors to find technological solutions, and global politicians trying to one-up each other, we will find a way to persist as a species.

Fear Within our Anthropocence and How We Can Over Come It

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My biggest takeaway about the political ecology of death in the Anthropocene is that people are ruled by fear. Political leaders, religious leaders, everyday people, and everyone in between has some amount of fear in their lives. Fear of our death, fear of failure, fand ear of how our world is being run.

This poem by Shakespeare speaks of fear:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50428/song-fear-no-more-the-heat-o-the-sun-

Fear does not have to be a negative influence. Letting fear control you allows for it to have power over you. But, acknowledging this fear creates a new opportunity. An opportunity for love, desire, hope, and a life full of adventure.

The Worm at the Core states “Why not depart from life as a sated guest from a feast” (Solomon) and I agree. Why not take our life for everything it has to offer. Living in the depths of despair does nothing for for anyone. This class has shown me that yes, our world is dark, has several demoralizing issues, and needs some fixing-but the beautiful thing is that we have the power to change this. We can be the light in our own world.

My action project was built around WashPirg’s Save the Orca Campaign with the goal of breaching the Lower Snake River Dam to allow more salmon to be available for the Orca’s to feed on. This is a passion project, and as I reference in my paper all passion projects are a way of coping with death anxiety. Passion projects to me are a positive way of working through personal death anxiety on some level. Being a part of something greater than oneself is an incredible feeling, and to me gives the feeling of hope.

Hope is stronger than fear, but when paired together can create opportunities to better our world

Shakespeare’s poem talks about how we will all come to rest as dust eventually (Shakespeare), and The Worm at the Core talks about how we are no more valuable to this Earth than a lizard or a potato from a biological perspective (Solomon), so then what is the point of being riddled with anxiety. This ay be a blindly optimistic point of view, but with how things are currently going… What do we have to lose by giving our best effort to enact change?

“I thought death would smell worse”: How Death has Crawled into Every Crevice of Society… and my Attic

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One of the main takeaways I got from this course is that death lives everywhere in society; if we take Terror Management Theory and Ernest Becker at face-value, everything we do, whether directly or indirectly, is to manage our own death anxiety. When I first heard that, it seemed a little convenient. Of course something that all humans experience was at the root of all our social, political, and environmental problems.

However, upon reflecting more upon the ways that death has influenced my own life—from trying to be remembered, to “doing good,” and more—I recognize that, in someways, it makes a lot of sense. Death has invaded pretty much every aspect of human life. And then, it invaded my attic.

I always thought I’d be able to tell if something had died in my house; if not by sight, then by smell. I never thought I’d spend more than three months living under death—and before you freak out and think there’s a dead body in the attic, there’s not—but, it seems like, similar to the way death operates in our society, it’s actually pretty easy to live under death if you have no idea it’s there. Until, of course, things start going wrong.

My roommate got severely ill almost a month ago, and it became clear that something in the house was causing it. She hired a mold inspector and, upon our exploring our attic, he found something that was admittedly much worse than mold. The wet spot on her ceiling wasn’t a water leak, and he didn’t think it was mold, either. No, he thought it was rodent urine. There were rat and squirrel nests in the attic. And carcasses. So. Many. Carcasses.

Immediately, he told us to be on the lookout for any kind of symptoms for illnesses we struggled to say and/or spell—oh, and ammonia poisoning. Leave the house if you get a headache. With one trip to the attic, it felt like our house had crumbled around us. We realized that this space that we had started to make a home could be killing us.

In the same ways that talking about death anxiety altered the way I view the world and those around me, the rat carcasses altered the way my roommates and I saw our home. We were no longer safe, and everywhere we looked we saw death.

Manhattan Wildlife Stock Illustration - Download Image Now - Rat, Cartoon, Death - iStock

Parallel to Climate Politics

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Walking around a room with 18 other people, eyes on the floor, lights off, mind adrift in thoughts of death, climate change, and politics, was a confounding experience.

My takeaways from this strange contemplative practice did not become clear until days later. In the moment, the practice seemed somehow ironic and meaningful, yet I could not understand why. I now see my experiences in this practice as almost representing or paralleling the politics of climate change.

Mindfulness among the masses. Image Credit: Unknown

With our eyes on the ground, I felt overwhelmed. Listening to Karen’s descriptions of the world, I felt helpless in the face our extensive problems. There is so much to unpack, not enough time, and I don’t even know where to start. Amongst all these other shoes walking around the floor, how can anything I do be significant? How can I sway people to my side if we all come from different backgrounds, have different priorities, and live in a polarized playground where everything is black and white, or so gray in between that it is unintelligible? This overwhelming feeling is matched in the politics of climate change. It is such an extensive issue that leaders and individuals have no idea where to start or how to help. This overwhelmingness is dangerous because it can lead to stalling on solutions, and inaction which could effectively cause voluntary human extinction.

When we lifted our eyes to acknowledge each other I struggled to remain serious. I found the reality of 19 of us aimlessly wandering the tiny classroom, trying not to hit each other, while listening to poems about death funny. Sort of a “laugh because otherwise you’ll cry” response. This reaction is similar to how many people handle the climate crisis—they don’t take it seriously. They laugh because it is a wild idea that humans could unintentionally cause so much destruction and death while wandering the earth industrializing. They ignore it, because if they believe that there is nothing they can do, then it is better to laugh and cherish what they have while they are alive, rather than to get lost in a spiral of despair waiting to die.

In this practice I felt myself putting on a face for my peers. I couldn’t just acknowledge them with an honest expression of my feelings because that would have been too vulnerable. I felt like I had to smile, exaggerate my expressions, and communicate a false narrative. This, too, is similar to the politics of climate change. World leaders go to climate conferences and exaggerate their actions and intentions, project their virtue and strength, and hide their vulnerability and honest reality of confusion and disaster. We want to die with pride, and for our largely old politicians, acknowledging a problem would mean dying guilty.

Bonn, Germany Climate Conference. Image Credit: UNFCC

Why Won’t My Brain Shut Up?

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When we first started contemplative practices, I couldn’t focus. My mind has a habit of wandering. I find myself lost in streams of consciousness, daydreaming, dissociating – whatever you want to call it, I cannot focus on a thought. When told to close my eyes in a dark room in the morning, my brain rushes – when told to think of one thing, it tries even harder to think of something else. Specifically, when asked to think about my death and mortality, I want to think about it and try to, but I struggle to produce fluid thoughts. What comes out is fragmented notions of what I think I should think about death rather than anything connected to an actual feeling.

I constantly feel distracted, and the contemplative practices have often only exacerbated it. So, why won’t my brain shut up? Why is it continually running from something, like it is afraid to take a break like it is afraid it won’t come back on again? I can tie my fear of death to

‘Busy Brain’ stock image represents the way capitalist productivity infiltrates the human mind.

my experiences with contemplative practices. I am constantly distracted as if my brain is allowed to settle for a second, and I just do nothing, my mind no longer feels as if I am living a fulfilling life. In Western capitalist society specifically, it is not common to just do nothing. The way society functions are through extreme productivity, individualism and competition, meaning you cannot sit and think, you cannot do nothing, and you cannot contemplate. Once you do, you are no longer a meaningful part of society.

In The Worm at the Core, Terror Management Theory explains that people are constantly craving distraction, either consciously or subconsciously, from their looming mortality. To subscribe to this, they chase a cultural worldview that fills them with a sense of self-worth. Western capitalism plays into this model extremely easily. Using contemplative practices to face this, therefore, seems beneficial, so why has it still been extremely difficult for me? Am I too caught up in the cycle of productivity that my mind will not contemplate? Is my mind too indoctrinated with the Western capitalist system? Or is it rather the contemplative practice itself that will not work in a classroom, in a university, that is entirely orientated around productivity and capitalist prosperity?

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.