Man’s Greatest Anxiety
“Death is man’s peculiar and greatest anxiety.” — Ernest Becker
We live as if we’ll never know death. But if I asked you, “Do you think you’ll live forever?” You would say, “No. What are you talking about?” Yet, we do things that imply otherwise.
Every day, we eat food that cuts our lives shorter than they need to be. We argue over the mundane. We consume more than we create. You’ve heard all these things before, yet we still regularly do them. Why?
Ernest Becker, the author of The Denial of Death, states we create illusions in our lives to repress thinking about death to stay sane. We wouldn’t be able to function in the world if we always thought about it. The problem is that we aren’t consciously thinking about it often or deep enough either, also leading to mostly illusory lives.
The pandemic is the first time the entire world has had to collectively think about death in a long time. And it’s scary. We as humans are reassessing what living and dying means, or at least should be.
I have more to unpack, analyze, and say. But these fragmented thoughts are what I have for now.
