Would losing your fear of death cure your anxiety? Or kill your ambition?
In the 1560s, French aristocrat Michel de Montaigne watched Death clean house all around him. His best friend died of plague. His father died. His younger brother was killed by a tennis ball to the head. And five of his six children died in infancy. Montaigne was so consumed by mortality that he couldn’t imagine a moment when death wasn’t following just behind him. Then, while riding through the woods near his estate, a horse tossed him to the ground, knocking him unconscious. There he hovered somewhere between alive and dead. To his surprise, despite his injuries, it felt…peaceful. Not long after, Montaigne retreated into a stone tower library on his property and started writing about everything: friendship, vanity, fear, and death. And in the process, he invented an entirely new literary form, the essay, and arrived at his most famous conclusion. He welcomed death, and he wanted death to come find him while he was doing something pleasant, like planting his cabbages.
Today we talk about Terror Management Theory, a field of psychology built on Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer-winning book The Denial of Death. It argues that the fear of dying is the hidden engine behind almost everything humans build: pyramids, religions, dynasties, and, apparently, a 500-foot clock inside a Texas mountain that Jeff Bezos spent $42 million to keep ticking for 10,000 years. We also look at a Stanford Graduate School of Business study that found a strange feedback loop. It’s a cycle which might explain why so many billionaires seem more interested in monuments than in, say, solving hunger, and why the rich among us might not even fear death the same way we do.
Did Montaigne lose his fear because he became a philosopher, or because he was rich enough to hide in a tower? And how do you turn your existential dread into a healthy, lasting legacy, instead of a pyramid or a mountain clock? Listen and find out.
Links:
https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/11/13/165025207/death-but-softly
https://carta.anthropogeny.org/events/sessions/human-mortality-denial-and-terror-management-theory
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/why-thoughts-death-make-us-yearn-power
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2790400/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jeff-bezos-touts-10000-year-cuckoo-clock/