To Live Fully in the Face of Death

By: Erik Rittenberry

“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 for men…

It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours.”
— Ernest Becker

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Life is ironic.

We spend the sum of our days coming into our own, developing our talents and unique gifts, chasing our passions, learning to stomach the disappointments and tragedies of life, finally making it to a ripe old age as a mature and grounded individual — only to be good for dying?

Seems like a cruel hoax.

Unlike all other species on the planet, we gaze into the abyss of the inevitable—death. We live in the shadows of our mortality. We shuffle through the days of our lives with the great burden of knowing our fate.

“The weight of the days is dreadful,” Camus reminded us.

Most of the time we live without thinking of death. But sometimes, more often when we get older, death comes lurking up into our consciousness and we come to the stark realization that one day in the not-so-distant future we’ll be buried in the dirt and mostly forgotten. The life we had lived so structured, divided, and safe; a life of love, hate, compassion, faults, and goodwill, will end just like the life of the rodent and the pesky insect that you killed in the garage yesterday.

We’re going to die. Having this knowledge alone should inspire us to live more deliberately and mindfully, never letting the frivolous things in life bog us down. But we don’t.

The poet Charles Bukowski put it best:

We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.

What if our fear of death is permeated so deep in our minds and souls that it subconsciously drives our actions while we’re alive? What if we spend our days creating and living in fantasies to dilute the terror of our looming death? What if we suppress the idea of our pending fate at a horrible cost?

What if the subconscious fear of death is causing us to retreat from life?

The Denial of Death

In his brilliant 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker wrote:

This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, and excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression — and with all this yet to die. It seems like a hoax. . . What kind of deity would create such complex and fancy worm food?

In writing this book, Becker was on a mission to figure out why human societies act the way they do. He wanted to uncover why there was so much evil brought into the world by the human race. Why in today’s contemporary world are so many of us spiritually ill, violent, and immensely shallow? Why do we congregate up into little social groups and become so intolerant and hateful of each other?

Today, there’s a dubious feeling of abandonment and anxiety that seems to be strangling many people. You can see the angst in the eyes of those in coffee shops and on the streets and in the mindless haste we live our fleeting lives. People are entirely consumed by the pettiness and trivialities of their dying culture, never leaving time for the deep and necessary reflection that leads to true self-realization.

We are afraid of life and we masquerade this fear by increasing our doing. The busier we become, the less time we have to come face to face with our souls. We delude ourselves into believing that busyness is being alive. We assess our lives by what, as one writer put it, “we accomplish rather than by the richness and fullness of our experience.” Our frantic mode of living in the modern world “is a clear sign of the fear we have of being and of life.”

Becker convincingly argues that we refuse to come to terms with our smallness in the world— a world where our body is in constant decay. What we long for most is immortality and we latch on to entities much larger than ourselves — the state, the party, a religion, cultural status—as a way to translate our unacknowledged littleness “into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.”

Religion at one time offered us a way to overcome that dreadful feeling of insignificance that we all harbor. Denying our animal bodies by putting faith in a Creator that loves us and has a special place for our lives after death helped us cope with our death anxiety. Religion offered us a way “to become part of such a larger and higher wholeness” and to escape the nagging trepidation and guilt of the “fallen man.”

But today, as religious dogma has become increasingly problematic for us to swallow, we’ve turned to culture as a coping mechanism. Humans are creatures that cannot simply BE. We must become something, achieve something, create something.

Culture was created from our unfettered drive to transcend our animal nature.

Culture is the grand stage where we’re able to don our masks, adopt our roles, and perform our theatrics for the audience.

Becker claims we create “cultural hero-systems” in which we “serve in order to earn this feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning.”

In other words, our urge to appear as a hero in society, whether through our actions, group belongings, good deeds, or creating art, are all subconscious attempts to deny the reality of our approaching death.

We spend years desperately trying to claw our way out of the relentless clutches of mediocrity. We yearn for fame, fortune, and notoriety; we climb that corporate ladder, run for office, join mass movements, buy expensive cars, and create art. This is our attempt to disguise our animal nature; an attempt to evade mortality and grasp for a type of heroism that Becker defines as “a reflex of the terror of death.”

The Ernest Becker Foundation further explains that we need to “create or become part of something that we feel will outlast our time on earth. In doing so, we feel that we become heroic and part of something eternal that will never die, compared to the physical body that will eventually die. This gives human beings the belief that our lives have meaning, purpose, and significance in the grand scheme of things.”

Human Character as a Vital Lie

Becker believed that humans are immensely terrified of standing alone in the world. He writes:

the reason man was so naturally cowardly was that he felt he had no authority; and the reason he had no authority was in the very nature of the way the human animal is shaped: all our meanings are built into us from the outside, from our dealings with others.

Becker argued that it’s these external forces that give form to the “self” or the “superego.”

In other words, our character is a lie because it’s fabricated from the influences of culture rather than our inner being.

“Our whole world,” Becker writes, “of right and wrong, good and bad, our name, precisely who we are, is grafted into us; and we never feel we have authority to offer things on our own.”

Becker argued that we build up our character walls as a “defense against despair” in an attempt “to avoid insanity because of the real nature of the world.” He recognized that “man could strut and boast all he wanted, but that really he drew his courage from a god, a government, sexual conquests, a flag or cultural status.”

We build character and culture in order to shield ourselves from the devastating awareness of our underlying helplessness and the terror of our inevitable death.

Becker discovered as many other intelligent minds have, that it’s our fear of death that causes us to shrink from life.

The irony of man’s condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation, but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.”

Stated differently, as Sam Keen deciphered in the introduction of Becker’s book, “We repress our bodies to purchase a soul that time cannot destroy; we sacrifice pleasure to buy immortality; encapsulate ourselves to avoid death. And life escapes us while we huddle within the defended fortress of character.”

The Problem with Heroism

Like everything else in life, there’s a dark side to our heroic projects. Becker claims that our quest for heroism is also the source of everything evil and destructive in the world. He contends that our pursuit to rid the world of evil is also in effect how evil is brought into the world.

Our idea of heroism is sometimes laced with a staunch self-righteousness that breeds divisiveness and human conflict. My god against your god, my country against your country, my politics against your politics. We tend to vilify other groups of people and their ideas, which strengthens the faith in our own. This is the great plague of humanity.

With our self-righteous beliefs and our ill-considered thinking of “right and wrong,” we do terrible things to each other. We become intolerant and violent and crave this vain sense of preeminence to make up for the nihilistic despair we veil behind insincere smiles. This is mankind’s brutal history. Our denial of death in the guise of heroic action has soaked the soil with continuous bloodshed throughout the ages.

Becker’s assumption mirrors what the great poet T.S. Eliot once observed:

Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm, but the harm [that they cause] does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”

How to live fully in the face of death?

We must step out of the protective custody of our character so as to be born.

We must shed our comforting delusions and embrace the true nature of who we are. “The practice of dying,” as Socrates urged. We must learn to turn inwards and face our mortality.

Becker concludes that our urge towards worldly significance will inevitably fail no matter how deep we plunge ourselves into our self-comforting delusions. We can only hide behind our brittle walls of character for so long. We can’t break away from what we truly are — creatures of insignificance unable to transcend the limits of the human condition. “We are gods with anuses.”

The moral courage to confront the silence of the universe and the anxiety of meaninglessness is a real manifestation of cosmic heroism.

Becker clearly understood that we must recognize the character lie that has us striving for outward concepts of heroism in the first place. By doing so, he says, we open ourselves up to infinity, or “the possibility of cosmic heroism.” Once the character lie is shattered we’re able to clearly see our “secret inner self,” discover our true talents, and enhance our “deepest feelings of uniqueness … to the very ground of creation.”

He writes:

Man breaks through the bounds of merely cultural heroism; he destroys the character lie that had him perform as a hero in the everyday social scheme of things; and by doing so he opens himself up to infinity, to the possibility of cosmic heroism …. He links his secret inner self, his authentic talent, his deepest feelings of uniqueness … to the very ground of creation. Out of the ruins of the broken cultural self there remains the mystery of the private, invisible, inner self which yearned for ultimate significance. …This invisible mystery at the heart of [the] creature now attains cosmic significance by affirming its connection with the invisible mystery at the heart of creation.

It’s no secret that people who feel intensely alive are the ones who’ve been diagnosed with a terminal illness or those who have endured a near-death experience. They’ve come to terms with death and live with death at the forefront of their lives. With death acknowledged rather than suppressed, it’s been shown that people live livelier and more grateful lives.

As the great existential writer, Camus once put it, “Come to terms with death. Thereafter, anything is possible.” Or as famed Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist Carl Jung preached, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

I’ll end this post with the words of one of the most prominent thinkers of the 20th century, Martin Heidegger:

If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life — and only then will I be free to become myself. ”

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Ernest Becker’s masterpiece book, The Denial of Death, is one of the most thought-provoking and life-changing books that you’ll ever read. Try to get your hands on a copy as soon as you can. It’ll reshape your whole mindset in a positive way despite its harsh truths. (Click here for the book)