Category Archives: Denial

Terror Management: a Necessary Evil?

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Throughout this class, I think I’ve realized one thing. Nothing is set; reality is perception. Facts are relative, and the truth is relative. The only real thing we have is the inevitability of death. In Baldwin and Buddhism: Death Denial, White Supremacy, and the Promise of Racial Justice James K. Rowe quotes James Baldwin.

“Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.”

In short, death is the one thing we can rely on. We focus a lot on the present during these past few cognitive practices. I’ve noticed that these reflections are centered around processing the current moment.

This might not be directly related to the course, but I think these contemplative practices have made me realize that to acknowledge death is to appreciate life.

In class, we talk alot about terror management because of its centrality to the course, but we never ask the question that I think is critical to understanding human behavior, “Is terror management essential to living a fulfilling life? If we didn’t have lows, we wouldn’t appreciate highs. Terror management is ingrained in our human psyche; if we are products of evolution, terror management must be an important part of human survival. Why do we deny something we cannot control? And what is the evolutionary benefit of existential self-consciousness? If death is inevitable, why are we made to fear it?

Death Symbolism & Death Personification in Art History | Art & Object

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. 

Meaning, Purpose, and Understanding the End

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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.

Terror Management and the Meat Industry

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Credit: Nasser Nouri, Flickr

“Working Undercover in a Slaughterhouse” by Avi Solomon raises several questions from our course theme: why do humans care about separating ourselves from animals? How is our indifference to slaughtering farm animals similar to our indifference to loss in worldwide biodiversity? How do we frame this for ourselves so that we can remain moral and virtuous?

As The Worm at the Core and our class have discussed, animals are a harsh reminder of our mortality. Our pets die, we see roadkill as we drive down the highway, and we watch nature documentaries where wild animals kill each other. Animals remind us that we are not immortal, so we distance ourselves hoping to overcome their failures. In the meat industry, we separate ourselves so that we can continue to eat the products, work in the slaughterhouses, and excuse ourselves of wrong doing. If we embraced animals as our kin, are slaughterhouses not the same as Nazi death camps? Is our man-made 6th mass extinction not a multi-species genocide?

Solomon’s article describes how the meat industry has been designed to minimize human contact with animal deaths. Only one person works in the room that shoots each animal in the head. Everybody else works along the conveyor belt handling “beef,” allowing them to wash their hands of regret and blame because they weren’t responsible, they’re just working a job handling the aftermath.

Credit: maol, Flickr

This brings up an uncomfortable parallel for me and my desensitization to plastic waste at Starbucks. When I first began working as a barista, I was very away of every plastic cup that I unnecessarily threw away. Now I do it with ease­­­­––it’s so much faster to throw away a lid with accidental whip cream on it than to wash it. I save myself time and an irritable customer. This minor convenience for me comes at the expense of our overflowing landfills and the countless creatures that will have to endure that lid for 450 years while it slowly decomposes.

For many people, even if they refuse to become desensitized to the slaughtering of the meat industry, or the plastic waste of the food industry, they can’t escape it. As is described by Solomon, a majority of the workers in the slaughterhouse are illegal immigrants, desperate for any work and money. As I’ve seen at Starbucks, many of my coworkers are without other job prospects­­––sure they could move to another fast food chain, but they are stuck in the system of constant, unnecessary disposal of plastic. They’re stuck relying on terror management­­­–­–distracting their consciousness, relying on culture for purpose and beliefs, and maintaining their self esteem by reminding themselves that their job is necessary to provide food to millions of people around the world.

Humans, Hubris, and the Anthropocene

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The Worm at the Core touched on how humans have developed systems of culture and domination that suppose to keep us placated in the face of death. One thing that escaped me, though, is how the fear of death inspired such rapid technological innovation (and subsequently spawned a myriad of climactic issues) and why our fear of death does not spawn action in the face of the deadly consequences of climate change.

In a separate course, I am reading Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement. One of the points he makes, which I think applies neatly to this course, concerns the increasing rates of destruction and lack of infrastructure to adjust to climate events linked to climate change (Ghosh specifically talks of Mumbai’s lack of preparedness for cyclones). Ghosh also points out that, while much of the 19th, 20th, and 21st century concerned themselves with dominating nature, we have subsequently made ourselves more vulnerable to the volatility of the climate.

Western, industrialized societies view the Earth and, subsequently nature, as a resource to be mined, extracted, or dominated. The building of dams, destruction of mountains, and filling of lakes represent efforts to change the natural environment for the sake of human advancement at the expense of the natural environment. While we now understand the many scientific processes that cause hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, etc., we are still wholly unable to stop them or even effectively cope with them. The irony then is that, through the unfettered mining and exploitation of Earth’s resources, we have worsened the conditions we already struggle to cope with. In the quest to become the master of nature, nature has become even more untamable.

I think the emphasis on technology as the primary solution to climate change is hubristic. Already, our attempts to master nature have ended in disaster that harms the people least involved in the creation of the problem. Unchecked economic growth and technological advancement inherently fails to recognize and reflect on how we got to where we are in the first place, and not every society has sought to expel fear of death through the domination of the planet as the West has. We might look towards nations like Ecuador, who established the “rights of nature” in their constitution, recognizing Earth and nature as stakeholders in the conversation surrounding climate change. Substantial, effective change is not possible until this is recognized on a larger scale.

“A Turn Towards Apathy”

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Content Warning: Nihilism/nihilistic ideation

Immortality is divisive; there are those who chase it with projects and aspirations to leave a legacy behind, and there are those who are struggling to live life as is. For the former, theories like Terror Management help to explain how immortality projects help us live a life that is meaningfully generative. This group actively looks for a contribution to life that lives beyond us as a way of immortalizing ourselves and thus, placating their death anxiety (Worm at the Core).

While Terror Management seems to explain this population well, I question its

Thred’s, “Nihilism”

applicability to the other group, a population that seems to be turning increasingly nihilistic. Class last week affirmed this idea when multiple peers agreed that chasing immortality isn’t of interest because many of us are struggling to want to live now. My extrapolation comes from a non representative population, so I outsourced to see if this feeling of struggling to engage with current life (let alone immortality) is reciprocated amongst others. 

Thred, a social change website/art platform (see image to right and below), published an article in May 2022 that observes this same phenomena. They write that, “climate change, political turmoil, growing wealth inequality, and many more knock-on capitalist trends have caused a rise in nihilistic attitudes” especially amongst young people.

Thred’s, “Nihilism”

Overwhelmed with caring about so many devastating things, nihilism (at its most extreme) points to not caring at all. It seems as though the sentiment of my last blog post is relevant here too: I struggle to think about the future when I am drowning in the present. It seems extreme, but walk across any corner of the UW campus, and I can almost guarantee students parroting the phrases “I don’t care anymore”, “I’m tired”, “I’ve given up”, “I just can’t”, “There’s too much”. 

So what implications does many’s turn towards nihilistic-like behaviors/attitudes have for TMT/death anxiety? Well, as I said last week, I’m still baking this thought (and thus, encourage others to test it/push back if it does not resonate). For right now, I’ve conceptualized it like this: it appears that for individuals (especially youth) turning towards nihilistic-like attitudes, death anxiety is disrupted by numbness. Instead of death anxiety, it more closely resembles death apathy. If this is true, I also wonder whether or not this manifests in physical consequences (becoming more risk-acceptant/engaging in less generative behaviors).

Image Description (first): A neon green background with varying neon pink skulls centered around one larger gray skull. There are yellow motion lines around skulls, signifying movement.

Image Description (second): A spiral background made of light and dark green. In the middle is a hand holding a skull, shaded and outlined in red. There are also red squiggles around the skull.

Death is what makes life great

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What role does the denial of death have in the Anthropocene?
Humans are currently a driving force of ecological disasters. We are ruining the ecosystem, killing off species, and destroying the ozone layer, which will kill all human life if nothing changes. What can we do to change this?
I think a part of the problem is dominant modern culture ignores death. Maybe this could be because most people don’t think about their deaths. Worm in the Core quotes Michel de Montaigne’s famous essay That to study Philosophy Is to Learn to Die,

—let us learn bravely to stand our ground, and fight him. And to begin to deprive him of the greatest advantage he has over us, let us take a way quite contrary to the common course. Let us disarm him of his novelty and strangeness, let us converse and be familiar with him, and have nothing so frequent in our thoughts as death. Upon all occasions represent him to our imagination in his every shape; at the stumbling of a horse, at the falling of a tile, at the least prick with a pin, let us presently consider, and say to ourselves, “Well, and what if it had been death itself?” and, thereupon, let us encourage and fortify ourselves. Let us evermore, amidst our jollity and feasting, set the remembrance of our frail condition before our eyes, never suffering ourselves to be so far transported with our delights, but that we have some intervals of reflecting upon, and considering how many several ways this jollity of ours tends to death, and with how many dangers it threatens it.

The book points out effective terror management should constitute being comfortable with one’s death. We should normalize talking about death so we can take a deeper appreciation of life, with more empathy towards living things around us. By being comfortable and reflecting on our own inevitable deaths, we can appreciate life’s beauty. This means being conscious of our actions and how they affect others and the planet.
I propose to whoever is reading this to think about death, not morbidly but about your death, and how that affects your actions, thoughts, and world views. Thinking about what you think can help you reflect on how to live a more decisive and aware life. Hopefully, you can be more self-conscious about your actions, evaluate whether you are spending your time the way you want to, and how you have affected those around you.
Anthropocene Syndrome: a complex of environmental degradation,... | Download Scientific Diagram

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

Qualms About My Demise

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“Political Ecology of Death in the Anthropocene” is a fascinating title––oddly specific, yet broad enough to cover so many things. Signing up for this course, I was hooked.

My death is something that I contemplate quite often. It entails considering the possible ways that I want my body disposed of: I hate the idea of being eaten by worms, so burial and composting are out, and while I don’t enjoy imagining my body burning, at least my cremated ashes won’t be a direct meal for some creature. It entails thinking about my soul––will I have a next life, or will my “soul” and conscious just cease to exist in the universe? It also entails significant FOMO (fear of missing out), which is my ultimate motivator in life to do my best, please as many people as possible, see as many places as I can, and consume without need. To quote the NPR podcast We’re All Gonna Die!, “the fear of death haunts the human animal like nothing else.” I can certainly relate.

Now, only a week into this course, I’m realizing that there are many problematic implications with how I approach the fear of my death.

Using systems thinking, my death and following disposal is individual, in that it is important psychologically to me. It is also part of a larger system of the earth’s ecology. How then should I approach the subject of my body? Do I respect myself and get cremated to avoid the “ew” factor? Or do I respect the Earth, future generations, and climate action, and instead choose composting? The fact that I have a choice is part of the problem and demonstrates how our species is out of bounds. I am inclined to choose an option that hurts the environment, other humans, and the entire planetary system. To the question of “what kind of species will we be,” from Professor Litfin’s Becoming Planetary, it will someday be up to me decide in this one small, yet impactful decision and make the mature choice.

Considering terror management theory, it may be my fear of the unknown that drives my FOMO and qualms of the soul. Maybe if I were religious, I would not feel the need to travel so much or buy so many things because I could find comfort and security in a certain “after.”

I’m curious to see how this course’s content, discussions, and contemplative practices will continue to insight deeper understandings and challenge my views about death.

Image Source: Ken Lambert, The Seattle Times. Recompose, the first human-composting funeral home in the U.S. in Kent, WA.

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/.