The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life
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This is probably due to the widespread belief that the effects of our relationship to death could not be understood or tested in a rigorous scientific manner.
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When confronted with reminders of death, we react by criticizing and punishing those who oppose or violate our beliefs, and praising and rewarding those who support or uphold our beliefs.
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We don’t love our parents because they feed us, he concluded; we love them because physical contact with our parents provides comforting security.
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As children become aware of themselves, typically between eighteen and twenty-four months, their budding grasp of their smallness and vulnerability makes them increasingly terrified by even more real and imagined dangers.
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Accordingly, children sometimes expect the dead to be reborn at a seasonably auspicious moment.
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These diversionary tactics are strikingly similar to what happens when adults think about themselves dying.
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Between the ages of five and nine, children think of death as avoidable if you are swift or smart enough to avoid getting caught.
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Having realized that death is inevitable and irreversible, they pledged permanent psychological allegiance to their culture.
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fortifying the psychological armor against existential terror that he’s been developing since childhood.
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who had thought about death and had to violate culturally sacred objects, took more than twice as long. They also said that they found the problems very difficult and felt considerable tension in trying to solve them.
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Take all the cultural trappings away and we are all just generic creatures barraged by a continuous stream of sensations, emotions, and events, buffeted by occasional waves of existential dread, until those experiences abruptly end.
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But in a world infused with meaning, we are so much more than that.
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these sources of self-esteem do not spring fully formed from some deep inner self.
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Accordingly, self-esteem is the feeling that one is a valuable participant in a meaningful universe. This feeling of personal significance is what keeps our deepest fears at bay.
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self-esteem buffers anxiety,
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Self-esteem takes the edge off our hostile reactions to people and ideas that conflict with our
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self-esteem protects us from deeply rooted physical and existential fears.
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prodding us on beneath the surface of awareness to maintain our protective shield against terror.
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Even the slightest intimation of our mortality prods us to work harder to leave our mark on the world.
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Such catastrophes occurred all over the world where indigenous cultures were subject to colonization.
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Without such a map, there is no basis for determining what behaviors are appropriate or desirable, leaving no way to plot a course to self-esteem.
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American society, in particular, puts great value on attributes and achievements that are unreachable for most individuals. The cultural value of wealth, and the humiliation of not having it, is a source of anxiety for millions, thanks to a glut of wealth-celebrating commercialism.
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And it is hardly surprising that one in ten Americans is clinically depressed and that so many suffer from anxiety, eating disorders, and substance abuse. These problems are, at least in part, a direct consequence of a culture that promotes rarely achievable standards for feeling worthy.
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Suffering from high levels of anxiety, people with low self-esteem do what they can to reduce it.
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He sought self-esteem as well as eternal fame—a point to which we will return later—by portraying himself as a martyr who represented the meek, even comparing himself to Jesus. And he wanted to be immortalized—as the most prolific school shooter ever.
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They love openly, laugh at themselves, and savor the moment.
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A RECENT STUDY OF COMMUNITIES around the world with the highest concentration of centenarians found that their old people felt like valued members of their extended communities. We have a lot to learn from the ancients; the youth, too, for that matter.
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Breast-feeding mothers with immature infants clinging to them could not hunt or avoid large predators without assistance, so our ancestors began living in larger groups to ward off predators and obtain food, including meat, more efficiently.
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The personal pronoun “I,” Becker observed, served as a “symbolic rallying point” for self-consciousness by giving each individual a “precise designation” of herself or himself.
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What happened when a life-form, crafted by billions of years of evolution to strive to survive at almost any cost, recognized that it was destined to lose that war?
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Rituals, art, myth, and religion—features of every known culture—together made it possible for people to construct, maintain, and concretize their supernatural conceptions of reality.
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Some combination of dance and song in turn likely formed the earliest rituals.
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authority; by holding up their end of the deal with the gods through ritual sacrifices, humans gained a sense of control over life and death, a sense that the spirits would protect them in this life and welcome them to the next one.
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Throughout history, and to this day, such rituals have enabled people to endure the loss of loved ones, dampening the dread associated with their own eventual demise to the point where they can continue their daily routines.
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Rituals, then, help manage existential terror by superseding natural processes and fostering the illusion that we control them.
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Indeed, recent studies confirm that such supernatural escapades serve to manage existential terror. After pondering their mortality, people fantasized more about being able to fly.
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Living in and around monuments constructed for ritual and religious purposes may have encouraged people to learn to farm, which would not have occurred as readily if they continued to maintain a more nomadic lifestyle.
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And religion gave our ancestors—as it gives us—a sense of community and shared reality, a worldview, without which coordinated and cooperative activities in large groups of humans would be difficult, if not impossible, to sustain.
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“the soul was created in the big bang of an irresistible psychological force—our will to live forever—colliding with the immutable biological fact of death.”
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while a fast metabolism is great for burning calories and fat, it also contributes to aging because it makes us wear out faster, analogous to driving your car a hundred miles more a day. Aging, they argue, results from toxic by-products of cellular metabolism, the process that turns food into energy.
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However, most of us, eventually figuring out we’re not going to make it that big, deploy more modest, subtle, and even disguised routes to symbolic immortality.
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Research around the world confirms that reminders of death increase the desire for children in the service of symbolically transcending death.
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The fact that some parents disown, abandon, or even murder offspring who stray from their own beliefs suggests that passing on the symbols we cherish can even be more important than passing on our genes.
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Thoughts of death also increase admiration for famous people and belief in the lasting nature of their work.
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And if you are utterly desperate or mentally unstable, you can seek lasting renown by committing horrible crimes.
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The trappings of wealth are about much more than comfort and aesthetics. They are also about feeling special and therefore immune to life’s normal limitations.
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Gold has always been both a highly valued religious symbol of immortality
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“It is not wealth that men desire, but the consideration and good opinion that wait upon riches.”
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Other studies have shown that people who view death most negatively are most attracted to high-status material possessions, especially if they have shaky self-esteem.
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we humans procure psychological equanimity by being valued in the eyes of higher powers: at first our parents, and, as we mature, the culture at large.
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