The Power of Death to Focus Your Life

How would you describe your relationship to death in general, and your death specifically? How did thoughts
of your frailty or extinction influence how you lived last week—or how you might live next week? Does the
shortening of your time on earth make your life richer? Are you at peace with the idea of the world continuing
without you, or do you crowd it out of your mind?

The fact is that you’ll spend infinitely more time un-alive than alive, so what are you going to do with your alive
time?

Most of us balk at questions like these, but I hope to show that accepting and even embracing our mortality is
the key to a better life.

Let me tell you how one very powerful book changed my relationship to death and my orientation to life ever
since.

Denial of Death
I stumbled upon the Pulitzer Prize-winning Denial of Death by Ernest Becker more than a decade ago by
accident. The cover looked interesting at the time, and I wondered what the prize was all about, so I gave it a
whirl. I could not have known that this book would be a serious life-changer for me.
Ernest Becker was a maverick scholar, for whom chasing tenure and following the academic herd were turn-
offs—teaching was not just a job to him. He was intensely driven by the need to get at the root of why
humans do what we do, and tell the world about it. To find the answers, he did not feel compelled to stay in
his traditional academic lane. Rather, he freely swerved and heavily borrowed from the several disciplines of
psychology, philosophy, sociology, biology, and anthropology in his quest to explain our most basic
motivations.

In the book, Becker skillfully dismantles Freud, excises his off-the-mark speculations underlying anxiety, and
puts him back together again as a man on his own immortality quest. Freud was no god, but a man like any
other—wishing his legacy to live forever. At the same time, Becker elevated less accessible, but more accurate
thinkers, especially Otto Rank, who plainly understood that man’s general anxiety was not driven by some
Oedipal complex, but by the anxiety of his own “creatureliness”—an animal who is going to die, and knows it.
The core of Becker’s insight was that our thoughts of vulnerability, weakness, impermanence, and mortality
stir up anxiety and even terror in us. As a result of this mostly unconscious dread, individuals, groups, political
parties, and nations either spiral into neurosis, or work like hell to mask, hide, mute, cover-up, and distance
ourselves from the anxiety of mortality and all of its reminders.

As a defense, we build layers, and layers of personal, cultural, and mythical character armor to shroud and
disguise the worm at the core of our existence—that we all go away, never to return. These immortality
projects aim to create the illusions of order over chaos, permanence over decay, triumph over evil, and so on
and on.

Before Becker, nobody acknowledged or talked about this powerful undercurrent driving our individual and
collective behavior.

Terror Management Theory Builds on Becker's Insights

Terror Management Theory (TMT), is a derivative of Becker’s writing. Coined by students of Becker, TMT gave
structure to Becker’s ideas and began to test them with falsifiable, experimental rigor. TMT shows that the
psychological force behind propaganda, prejudice of all kinds, evil generally, blind deference to authority, war,
politics, religion, patriotism, art, symbolism, and much more is our fear of mortality. It's powerful and
pervasive.

Even though Becker’s insights and TMT have amazing explanatory and predictive powers, they remain very
accessible and practical in real everyday life. Here’s what Denial of Death, and Terror Management Theory
have taught me:

We All Fear the Reaper, but Life Doesn't Have To Suck

Many years after reading Denial of Death for the first time, I still reflect on what the book has done to and for
me. Reading it was one of those singular moments, impossible to forget where I was at the time. For me,
there was life before reading the book, and life after. That book shook me awake from a comfortably numb,
materialist existence, to a genuinely heartfelt “glad to be here” attitude (at least on most days).
We take life for granted, but we really, really shouldn't be here—there are just too many forces conspiring to
knock us down or knock us off. Even if we manage to dodge every proverbial bullet, there is a natural upper
limit to our biological organism, and our internal parts will wear out. There are a million ways to die, and one
of those ways will catch up to us—we will all go the way of spoiled milk, the Romans, and the dinosaurs. One
day, we will not get up again. We will breathe our last. And when we are gone, we will be really and
permanently gone.

When death shows its many faces, there are four ways we deal with it:

Denial — (the default response for most of us, as shown by Becker)

Despair — (the terrifying response we use denial or fight to avoid)
Acceptance — (a rare response that allows us to function)
Embracing — (an even rarer response that transforms the life we have)

Becker showed that the thought of extinction haunted Freud and Jung, causing them both to faint whenever
they contemplated visiting Rome (by then extinct). As a result, both men continued to pour more energy into
their immortality projects—their legacies.

For me, reading Becker made denial of my own death a non-option. I couldn't unsee the skull in the mirror.
My former immersion in the cultural milieu, and my belief in national and religious myths suddenly became
like the emperor’s clothes: whispy, and translucent. The promise of life after death was exposed as a
threadbare, moth-eaten security blanket—intended to soothe my fears in exchange for compliance. At the
time, my realization was deeply wounding and disillusioning, and I longed for the naiveté I once enjoyed. I was
going to die, and the world would carry on without me in it.

Accepting Death is Life-Enhancing Medicine

Since denial wasn't an option and I refused to despair, I chose acceptance instead. Now, even older, I practice
embracing my death as an essential part of my life.

When death overtakes me, I want to be as fully present as I can. I want to stare it in the face and smell it
in my nostrils... But until then, I have work to do.

Contemplating death in small, regular, safe doses makes life better—not in the morbid, neurotic, masochistic
sense—but in the practical sense that today matters—a lot. The right dose of contemplation is one that leaves
you feeling authentic, and grateful for this day.

Sudden, stark reminders of death can shatter our bliss, such as when driving past a gruesome accident,
learning that one has cancer, losing a pet, or attending a funeral. These triggers recruit our survival instinct
and evoke a denial response, which leads us to harden our character armor—but after the shock and grief
passes, the life itself is so much sweeter.

When we make it a practice to contemplate our death for a brief moment every morning and night, or at
meals, the experience is like a small dose of a bitter tincture going down, but rejuvenating and empowering
between doses.

This regular practice builds immunity against the anxiety of death that makes us shrink or rely too much on
mythical or cultural tokens of salvation. The method works by the principle of extinction or becoming familiar
with a stimulus so that it no longer evokes an anxious response.

YOLO
Since reading Denial of Death many times, this has become my motto:

Life is short—walk hard.

In the scriptures I was raised on as a kid, we were taught to shun the “eat, drink, and be merry" lifestyle
because it was a kind of trap that would get you stuck in a lower world in the afterlife. I no longer believe in
judgment day as the reason to live well. It took me almost 40 years to learn this for myself.

I think the millennials (my kids) might get it best when they say “you only live once.” YOLO is an attitude that
breeds courage, but it often breeds hubris when taken too far. The real power of YOLO is helping focus on the
f*cks that matter most. This popular book is good in its own right:

...but I have to confess that Mark Manson made it twice as hard-hitting by tipping his hat to Ernest Becker in
the last chapter.

We do only live once, so make today matter. Connect with somebody. Express your love or concern. Mend a
fence or two. Invent something. Clean up that mess you made. You will not live forever, but you can enjoy
paying it forward today and making life better for someone else.

I work as a manufacturing and supply chain systems architect, but as a hobby, I contribute to a website
called [GrassRootsNLP.com], where you will find free NLP tools, tactics, and strategies for moving past
challenges toward better times.