This episode is also on Bilibili too.
I’m a person who’s especially afraid of death. Ever since I was little and developed even a slight capacity for thought, I’ve been intensely curious about death. I’m sure I’m not alone in this. Among everyone watching this episode, there are probably plenty of people who have mixed feelings about “death”: on the one hand, they desperately want to avoid it; on the other, they can’t help being drawn to it.
The British Romantic poet William Wordsworth said, “For me as a child, the hardest thing was admitting that the concept of death would eventually apply to me too”—a thought that “often left one close to tears, yet unable to cry.”
At some point while growing up, most of us probably suddenly realize that one day, we ourselves will die. In a sense, it’s at that very moment that we stop being children and become fully human.
Over the past two or three years, the thing that gave me an entirely new understanding of death was a book called The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life, written by three American social psychologists: Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski. The Chinese edition came out in 2016. Sadly, very few people have read it, and it isn’t well known—but I think its value has been seriously underestimated. So I decided to take it apart here and talk it through with you.
Death anxiety hangs over every dimension of human life, from the microscopic to the macroscopic. Realizing that we will eventually die profoundly affects our thoughts, emotions, behavior, and every aspect of our lives.
On the macro level, throughout the long river of human history, fear of death has guided the development of art, religion, language, economics, and science. It made the pyramids of Egypt rise high into the sky, led Qin Shi Huang to build the astonishingly vast Terracotta Army, and also led to the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers in New York being struck by hijacked planes.
On the personal level, realizing that we will eventually die also makes us eager to get into huge fights with enemies we’ve imagined, and eager to become famous—even if that fame vanishes in an instant. Death also makes us uncomfortable with our bodies and conflicted about sex.
You could say that fear of death is one of the main driving forces behind human behavior, even though much of the time I may not be aware of it at all.
Next, I’ll draw on The Worm at the Core to talk about why humans experience death anxiety and how we cope with it.
The first question we need to ask is this: Is death anxiety a survival instinct shared by many animals, or is it a very special fear unique to humans?
The answer is that death anxiety may be unique to humans.
All living things are born with physiological instincts for self-preservation, so in the broadest sense, every animal is afraid of death when danger is right in front of it. But human fear of death is fundamentally different from the fear of death experienced by bats or earthworms. The difference is this: only we humans can realize that, no matter what we do, we will ultimately lose our struggle against death.
The evolution of the human brain gave us two especially important mental abilities. First, we have a highly developed sense of self. Second, we can think across time—past, present, and future.
Based on the evidence available so far, only humans can realize that they exist at a particular time and in a particular place. Of course, this conclusion isn’t absolute. Future evidence may show that some other highly intelligent animals can realize this too.
In any case, we humans know that we are somewhere, at some point in time, doing something. We’re aware of our own existence in space and time.
But precisely because we can be aware of our existence, we also know that one day we will cease to exist.
And so, awareness of death became a bug bundled with the highly advanced intelligence of the human species.
Think about it for even a moment, and awareness of death can plunge us into terrifying fear. We may even feel that this is the ultimate joke. On the one hand, humans, like every other living thing, have a powerful desire to stay alive. On the other hand, we’re smart enough to know that this most basic desire is doomed to go unfulfilled in the end. We paid a heavy price for self-awareness.
Other animals experience death anxiety only when danger is approaching. The tragedy of being human is that even after the approaching danger has disappeared, we still feel afraid.
The Belgian composer Jacques Brel said that human death is like “a dirty old man hiding in wait for a rabbit,” lurking constantly in the shadows of the mind.
That’s how death anxiety comes into being.
Fortunately, we aren’t completely helpless in the face of this enormous fear. We’ve developed ways of coping with death anxiety, locking this destructive fear down at an intensity we can just barely tolerate.
The most primitive way of fighting death anxiety is to imagine that the soul is immortal. We’ll save that for the next installment.
Today, let’s talk about a psychological strategy that’s more interesting and subtle than “the immortality of the soul”: linking our own existence to something eternal.
If we believe that we are part of something grander and more enduring, then even when death arrives, we can continue to exist along with that grander thing.
What is this grander thing? Usually, it’s the cultural worldview we believe in. A cultural worldview can be a person’s religion, or a cultural system they accept. If I’m part of my religion, if I’m part of my culture, then I seem to experience a kind of comfort—as if I can become immortal along with the immortality of my religion and culture.
This is also why we desperately want to join groups that share our values. It’s why we long to leave behind creative works of art, why wealthy people put their names on buildings, and why celebrities pursue fame and long to live in other people’s hearts. I will become immortal along with the cultural values I accept and create.
Of course, from the most rational perspective, this mindset is a little self-deceptive. After all, you and your cultural worldview aren’t the same thing. But so far, psychologists have conducted a huge number of experiments, and again and again they’ve shown that people often use this mindset to escape death anxiety. Once death anxiety is triggered, people instinctively retreat into the cultural worldview they believe in to seek comfort.
For example, in American courts, the bail set for sex workers arrested for prostitution is generally $50. But in one study, a judge was first asked to write about “the emotions you feel when thinking about your own death.” This naturally triggered his death anxiety. In the ruling that followed, he raised the bail by nearly $500—more than nine times the normal amount. Once the thought “death is coming” entered the judge’s mind, he displayed a strong sense of right and wrong, raising the banner of the law and defending the legal principles he believed in.
In another study, a group of Americans first listened to two professors. One strongly supported the American system; the other complained bitterly about American politics. With no other influence applied, the American participants generally preferred the professor who supported the American system. Easy enough to understand: patriotism, human nature, and all that. But interestingly, if the participants were first asked to describe their emotions about their own impending death—that is, if their death anxiety was triggered—they became even more enthusiastic in supporting the pro-American-system professor and even more hostile toward the anti-American professor. In other words, when death anxiety arose, the participants became fiercely defensive of the values they endorsed.
For another example, Germans interviewed outside retail stores showed no particular preference for German products. But Germans interviewed in front of cemeteries became more likely to choose German food and German cars.
What’s fascinating about these experiments is that people’s reaction of embracing the worldview they believe in is linked only to being reminded that death is coming. If participants were asked to imagine social rejection, failing an exam, or suffering intense physical pain, none of those things made them more devoted to their beliefs and values.
So, embracing the cultural worldview we believe in is one way humans evade death anxiety.
And on top of that, we’ve developed a second way of dealing with death anxiety: maintaining our own sense of value—in other words, what we usually call “self-esteem.” When death anxiety is triggered, we become especially eager to raise our self-esteem and feel that we are worthwhile people.
Raising self-esteem and embracing a cultural worldview are actually connected. Fundamentally, in both cases we’re trying to connect ourselves with something grand and immortal. The cultural worldview is the grand thing on one end, and we’re on the other. The more valuable we feel, the more deserving we are of that grand thing, and the more our actions match the system, the tighter our connection to it becomes.
And so self-esteem becomes another shield against death anxiety. There’s plenty of evidence for this too. Let’s mention just a few examples. As I said earlier, people reminded that death is coming become more defensive of their worldview and harsher toward people who attack their culture. But if a group of Americans already has strong self-esteem, or if their self-esteem has been boosted, then even when reminded that death is coming, they don’t react as negatively toward people expressing anti-American sentiments.
Conversely, when we feel death anxiety, we also seek higher self-esteem. People who connect self-esteem with physical strength often exert more force when they think about eventually dying. People who connect self-esteem with health increase the intensity of their exercise. People who connect self-esteem with beauty pay more attention to their appearance.
So, to sum up: in the face of death anxiety, people embrace both a cultural worldview and self-esteem. Together, these can be described even more simply as the pursuit of meaning in life. At bottom, people use meaning in life to fight the void of death. There’s still a lot more to say on this subject, and it runs through the whole of The Worm at the Core. But next time, we’ll temporarily switch perspectives and look through the lens of history to see what interesting intersections there have been between death anxiety and human history.
Written by: Zhichao Wei
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