What if one of the most powerful forces shaping human behaviour is something we rarely talk about – our fear of death?
Sheldon Solomon is a social psychologist and one of the world’s leading researchers on terror management theory – the idea, inspired by Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, that our awareness of mortality quietly shapes much of human behaviour.
For more than four decades, Sheldon and his colleagues have studied what happens when people are reminded of their mortality. Their research suggests that death anxiety can make us cling more tightly to our beliefs, become more hostile towards those who are different, seek money and status, support authoritarian leaders and even become more willing to exploit the natural world.
But there is another possibility.
What happens when, instead of denying death, we actually turn towards it?
In this conversation, we explore:
- Why humans are uniquely aware of their own mortality
- How terror management theory helps explain seemingly irrational human behaviour
- Why fear of death can intensify tribalism, polarisation and hostility
- How existential anxiety can increase our attraction to authoritarian leaders
- Why money and status can become unconscious attempts to escape mortality
- The surprising relationship between death anxiety and environmental destruction
- Why modern Western culture may be particularly death-denying
- What near-death experiences reveal about our relationship with mortality
- How meditation, mindfulness and psychedelics may change the way we respond to death
- Why awe, humility, gratitude and nature could help us become more psychologically resilient
- Whether today’s converging crises are forcing humanity through a collective initiation
- And what Sheldon calls the need for a new kind of existential maturity
Sheldon argues that we may be living in a culture saturated with death anxiety — much of it operating beneath conscious awareness. Yet confronting our mortality may offer something unexpected: a deeper appreciation for being alive.
As Sheldon reflects personally, after decades of studying death intellectually, it was only later in life that he began to experience the importance of practising awe, humility and gratitude — finding meaning in something as simple as walking outside, encountering another person or planting a tree that may outlive him.
Ultimately, this is a conversation about death – but perhaps even more importantly, it is about how to live.
Could the crises gathering around us be part of humanity’s initiation into a more mature relationship with mortality, with each other and with life itself?
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