How death anxiety shapes our lives

Revisiting Ernest Becker's seminal work "The Denial of Death," and getting to know the hidden force driving our thoughts, behavior and life pursuits.

One day, you will be gone.

When this day comes, you will be nothing more than a name on a tombstone, or ashes scattered to the wind. There will be an empty seat at the table where you used to eat. You will be nothing but a memory in the minds of the people who knew you—and when those people are gone, even your memory will be lost forever. Not a trace of your existence will remain.

And that’s not all. Everything you’ve ever strived for—the achievements, milestones, life projects, and relationships—will also be long gone, all reduced to dust.

Is there a more terrifying thought than this—the loss of your self, your life and everything you’ve ever known and loved?

For most people, the thought of our eventual non-existence is simply terrifying.

Death is something we don’t like to think about. We unconsciously avoid the subject. And yet, death anxiety is ever-present in our lives, whether we are aware of it or not. It exists as a background hum in our consciousness, bubbling up to the surface level of the mind only in moments when we’re forced to confront our mortality: pandemics, natural disasters, the death of a loved one, an accident or diagnosis.

The fear of death is a natural part of being human that shapes the way we think and behave in countless subtle and not-so-subtle ways. It’s not always a bad thing, but left unchecked, it can and often does hinder our ability to live the lives we were truly meant to live. By bringing death anxiety to light—turning towards it instead of away from it—our awareness of our own mortality can make our lives richer, more meaningful, more colorful and more urgent.

Understanding Existential Anxiety

Humans are unique among animals in our awareness of mortality: the fact that we live our lives knowing that we're going to die. But somehow, we go about our day relatively unfazed by this fact. Rather than succumbing to existential terror and despair at the thought of our eventual annihilation, we generally live fulfilling (or at least functional) lives.

Most importantly, we live as if it all matters, even though we know it will all eventually be gone—our grandest ambitions, our deepest loves, our most hard-earned wisdom.

You might think you’ve made peace with death. It’s possible, but we still have physiological and psychological survival mechanisms meant to protect you from death that react when we face a threat. How do these responses not constantly overwhelm us? How do we just go about our lives like everything is peachy?

The secret is our ability to make meaning of our lives and feel connected to something greater, which keeps death anxiety at bay.

To understand how your fear of death impacts your life, look no further than the work of Ernest Becker, cultural anthropologist and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1973 classic, The Denial of Death (published while he was dying of colon cancer at age 49). Becker devoted his life to understanding existential anxiety, how we deal with it, and the way it brings out both the best and worst in humanity. He investigated how our awareness of mortality impacts our day-to-day behavior, seeking to understand how it’s possible to live a meaningful life in the face of our inevitable demise.

The heart of Becker’s findings is this: Our true fear isn’t death. It’s living a life without meaning. The thought of death can both cause anxiety and motivate us to create meaning. So how do we navigate this inner tension? And how do we learn to work with it more skillfully—so that it works for us rather than against us?

The first step is to understand how our mind processes the thought of death. Based on Becker’s writings, a group of psychologists in the ‘80s developed the field of “Terror Management Theory” to explain how we create meaning and react to our fear of death.

Here’s the basic gist: We all have a set of worldviews and cognitive strategies that we utilize to protect us from existential anxiety. In particular, we use what Becker calls “culture”—a set of beliefs about the way things should be and what gives life meaning—as a way to buffer against death anxiety. For the most part, these beliefs are adopted from the larger social landscape we live in.

Our culture provides a set of benchmarks that we use to measure whether we’re living lives of meaning: think wealth and success, marriage and children, creative achievement and contribution. Aligning ourselves with our cultural values also provides the comforting sense that we’re part of something bigger that will live on after we’re gone, either literally (as in, a religious belief in the afterlife) or symbolically (writing a book, having kids, creating generational wealth, launching a business). Much of what we strive for, according to this framework, is motivated by unconscious attempts to ward off the specter of a meaningless existence.

When we live up to these cultural benchmarks, we feel good about ourselves! And we feel better about the fact that we’re going to die one day. As Gregory Sammis from the Ernest Becker Foundation explains, the reason we’re not going around thinking about how scared we are to die is precisely because we have this system of culture and self-esteem in place as a buffer. When we live up to our culture’s standards and recieve validation from others, we feel good and carry on with our lives relatively free from existential terror—hence “terror management.”

This theory has been tested in thousands of psychological studies that show how our awareness of mortality influences our thinking and behavior. Based in these findings, here’s how some of your most important life pursuits might actually be a strategy for dealing with existential anxiety:

• You chase success and achievement. American culture values achievement above all else—in fact, we work so hard to achieve success that we literally make ourselves sick. Burnout is a cultural epidemic. Striving to meet this cultural benchmark drives us to become entrepreneurs and launch businesses, transform ourselves into influencers and personal “brands,” compete for entry into Ivy League schools, and spend our lives climbing the corporate ladder. From Becker’s perspective, this is all a strategy for gaining acceptance by the culture and boosting our self-worth, thus warding off the threat of a meaningless existence. The thinking is this: If we achieve, our lives will have meant something. Gives a whole new meaning to the 30 Under 30 list, doesn’t it?

• You feel anxious about finding a partner and starting a family (or you’re a smug married person). If you’re single in your 20s or 30s, seeing Instagram photos of everyone’s weddings and babies may create an adrenaline spike that is deeply rooted in death anxiety. According to Becker, relationships offer protection from death anxiety. Marriage is viewed as an achievement in most cultures and helps us to feel that we’re living a life of meaning, while being “chosen” by a romantic partner makes us feel important and contributes to self-esteem. Relationships are also a way we seek “symbolic immortality,” meaning that we strive for continuity beyond our own death by living on through others.

• You seek out religion or spiritual practices. Your meditation practice or next ayahuasca retreat may be a buffer against existential anxiety. Becker felt that we need religion—or some sort of spiritual belief system—to ward off death anxiety. (Religious belief, as he puts it, “relieves the absurdity of earthy life.”) We all have to contend with the greater meaning of life in some way, and religion grants us the ability to do just that.

• You strive to accumulate wealth. Financial security is a tried-and-true safeguard against death anxiety! Obsessing over your net worth and seeking to accumulate wealth and material possessions can help ward off existential anxiety and create a sense of security in the face of mortality. It makes us feel accepted by our culture, which prizes financial success, while generational wealth also offers a way to feel that we are a person of significance who will leave a legacy behind and contribute to the greater good.

• You head to the gym—or to the bar. Fear of death can strongly influence health-related behaviors, both for better or for worse. You might be motivated to adopt healthy behaviors like working out or eating clean, or perhaps obsessively tracking your heart rate variability, sleep patterns and daily steps. But the opposite could also be true: some people engage in drinking, smoking, partying or otherwise trashing their bodies as a form of defiance against mortality.

• You’re afraid of public speaking. Can all fears be traced back to the fear of death? Probably so. According to the Ernest Becker Foundation, the common fear of public speaking is just thinly-veiled death anxiety. We need social validation to feel that we are important and valuable, thus reducing our death anxiety. Public speaking means risking failure and judgment—and the stakes are high! To fail would constitute a “social death” that makes us feel that we’re not important in the eyes of our culture. Facing social rejection, death anxiety resurfaces as we are forced to confront the possibility that our lives have lacked meaning.

Death Reminders: Making Existential Anxiety Conscious

Generally we go through life not thinking about death: out of sight, out of mind. Or perhaps, we actively avoid thinking about it. But like we said, there are moments when avoidance inevitably fails: things like witnessing the horrors of the Israel-Gaza war, , the sudden loss of a parent or friend, an accident or diagnosis. These are called death reminders.

Once we encounter a death reminder, an alarm bell goes off in our subconscious, which then reminds us of all the things in our lives that make us feel secure and give us a sense of meaning and self-worth. We remind ourselves of why we matter and everything we do to live a life of significance.

Here’s the important thing to know: Death reminders spur people to live up to their values. When reminded of your mortality, what you value becomes more prominent. The things that matter most to you come to the forefront of your mind.

What does this mean for us, practically speaking? By contemplating our mortality (aka giving ourselves a death reminder), we can get clear on what matters most to us and reorganize our lives around it—ultimately allowing us to live a more meaningful, authentic life.

There are many ways to work consciously with death reminders to transform death anxiety so that it works in our favor. There’s a Bhutanese tradition of thinking about death five times a day in order to promote feelings of gratitude and happiness. In Stoicism, memento mori (“remember you will die”) is a philosophical tool to inspire and motivate us to live fully right now and to not waste our lives. And in Buddhism, the five remembrances are recited as a call to the urgency of waking up, right now.

Our values come forward when we are forced to confront the limited time we have here. We stop postponing the things that really matter: loving others, creating beauty, being kind, honoring our creative longings. There are countless stories of people who, when faced with their own mortality, found their callings, passions and life directions.