Psychological
What if everything you do is secretly about dying?
When researchers remind people of their own mortality (even subtly), those people immediately become more defensive of their worldview, more hostile to outsiders, and more obsessed with status. This reaction has been replicated hundreds of times. Ernest Becker predicted it decades before the experiments existed.
The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity — activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man.— Ernest Becker, *The Denial of Death*
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The thinker
Cultural Anthropologist & Pulitzer Winner
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) was an American cultural anthropologist whose Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death argued that the fear of death drives most of human behavior.
Based on The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker — Core Ideas, summarised and reframed by Insights.
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