The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life

by Sheldon Solomon

What time is it now for you, the reader? What does it mean that it’s some day of the week, some month, some year? Isn’t that all an illusory structuring of your conscious experiences provided for you by your culture to help you impose order and permanence on something chaotic and fleeting? If this is a Thursday, how comforting an illusion it is that there will be another Thursday, and another one after that.

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. But in a world infused with meaning, we are so much more than that.

The seemingly trite words “self-esteem” are at the very core of human adaptation. They do not represent an extra self-indulgence, or a mere vanity, but a matter of life and death. The qualitative feeling of self-value is the basic predicate for human action. … Unlike the baboon who gluts himself only on food, man nourishes himself mostly on self-esteem. —ERNEST BECKER, The Birth and Death of Meaning