Episode 34: The (Surprisingly) Positive Aspects of Existential Dread and Terror Management Theory

In this episode, April warns people that they might need a break while listening; but in the end, it's surprisingly positive. Just like her!!!

Episode 34 Show Notes

https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/what-to-know-existential-dread
Good discussion of the basics of existentialism, existential dread, why existential crises occur and how to handle them.

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220929-the-unsettling-power-of-existential-dread
David Robson's article explains how existential dread changes the way we think, reporting on the upswing in conspiracy theories after distressing events that trigger existential dread.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denial_of_Death
Yep, I'm citing Wikipedia here, but it's a decent discussion of Ernest Becker's groundbreaking work.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/31/the-worm-at-the-core-on-the-role-of-death-in-life-solomon-greenberg-pyszczynski-review
Excellent review of Solomon, Greenberg, and Psyzczynski's seminal work about terror management theory.

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.595990/full
Great article about how many individuals used creative expression to alleviate their distress during the Covid-19 pandemic.

https://www.un.org/africarenewal/web-features/i-was-tested-limit-%E2%80%94-rwanda-genocide-survivor
The harrowing story of a Rwanda genocide survivor.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7498956/
The original researchers of terror management theory apply their understanding of it to the Covid-19 pandemic.

https://mymodernmet.com/what-are-the-lascaux-cave-paintings/
Take a look at these beautiful cave paintings--that's how you live forever, people! Do something amazing.

Transcript

Episode 34: Existential dread and how it affects our ability to think clearly

Hello and welcome to Episode 34 of Think It Through. Before I begin, I just want to let you know that I will be talking about some things that might trigger negative thoughts and feelings in some people, so keep that in mind as you listen. If you need to stop and take a break, I understand; however, I hope you can make it to the end because it’s not all negative, in fact there’s a lot of positivity in the episode as well.

That being said, this is a difficult topic, but one I find fascinating because I think it answers a lot of questions about why people do what they do. At times throughout your life, you’ve probably gotten all philosophical and pondered the great questions like ‘what is the meaning of life?’ What’s it all about? Why am I here? What will happen to me when I die?” Yeah, all deeply intense questions that people have been asking themselves for as long as there has been conscious thought. But the answers to those questions may lead us to an awareness of our own mortality and cause us to feel fear, anxiety, and even terror. Those feelings can then lead to guilt about the past and hopelessness about the future. And there’s a name for that—existential dread. The emotions that arise from existential dread affect our ability to think clearly and rationally, and can lead to beliefs and decisions that may not serve us well in the long run. So today I’m going to define existential dread, and something called terror management theory; which is a theory that seeks to explain the ways we try to mitigate the negative emotions that come from recognizing that we are finite creatures. We’ll see how many of the choices we make in our lives are responses to those emotions, and while some of those choices are helpful, uplifting, and add meaning to our lives and our culture, others have the potential to hurt us and those around us. Finally we’ll talk about ways we can use those feelings to help, not hurt.

So, let’s get all philosophical and learn about existential dread.

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Let me remind you that I’m not a philosophy professor, I teach communication. But there’s a lot of overlap in those disciplines, because so many of the ways we express ourselves arise from how we view ourselves and the world around us. According to a WebMD article by Susan Adcocks titled “What to know about existential dread,” most of us have pondered the great questions of life, just like philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Nietzsche, and recognized that we are responsible for making our lives meaningful. And that’s what the philosophy of existentialism is all about—that life itself is essentially meaningless. Now, that sounds bad, but it’s not—existentialism says that any meaning in our lives must be created by us. And if you are excited and happy about that responsibility, that can lead to you creating an authentic existence that is true to your values and beliefs. But sometimes the idea that you’re responsible for your own life can be frightening and leave you anxious and worried. And that’s where existential dread comes in. Feelings like anxiety, depression, loneliness, isolation, lack of motivation and energy, can take over your thoughts until they are an obsession. And of course if you are feeling those things on more than an occasional basis, it might be time to seek out some counseling. So yes it can affect how we feel about ourselves; but it’s not just the fear associated with our personal life that leads to existential dread. BBC correspondent David Robson says we are also worried by big events that have the potential to affect us, like the Covid-19 pandemic, US Presidential elections, or extreme weather events.  Even things that maybe don’t affect us on an immediate basis can still have a great deal of power over our thoughts and emotions, like wars such as those between Russia and Ukraine, or Israel and Gaza, or even the possibility of global nuclear war. Are you depressed yet? Yeah, sorry about that; but what you’re feeling is existential dread. And it’s been shown that the anxiety aroused by large-scale events like these does affect how we think and act. Which leads me to the next item on my list—terror management theory.

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In the 1980’s, Sheldon Solomon, professor of psychology at Skidmore College in New York, developed terror management theory along with his colleagues Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski. The theory states that we are always aware, on some level, of our own mortality; and that awareness affects our daily lives in profound ways. Their work was based on anthropologist Ernest Becker’s groundbreaking work titled The Denial of Death, which says that most human action is taken to either ignore or avoid the inevitability of death. Think about that for a moment—that’s a pretty big statement. MOST human action (so pretty much everything we do from the time we recognize we are going to die to our actual death) is done to AVOID thinking about the fact that we are going to die. Now many people would say that they don’t think about their deaths at all, or maybe very rarely, and certainly not every moment of the day. But those people would be wrong, according to these scholars, who spent decades investigating how our underlying, constant awareness of our inevitable demise plays into the ways we live out our lives. In 2015 Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski published a book describing their research on terror management called The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life. We are, Solomon says, “biologically predisposed to want to survive” just like any other life form. “But we are not the same as other creatures; we’ve got a big brain and that makes us able to do some things that they can’t. Specifically we can think abstractly and symbolically, imagining things that don’t yet exist and working to make them real.” While that’s amazing, that same ability to imagine things also causes us to imagine our own death and realize that not only will we die, but it could happen at any time—and that the reasons for our demise are often beyond anything we could control. The potential of humans to be overwhelmed by this leads us to manage that terror by embracing what Solomon refers to as culturally constructed belief systems, or world views, that give us a sense that we have value, that we’re not just meat puppets waiting to get hit by a bus or a comet. Whether we are aware of it or not, our sense that we are valuable in the world is the thing that gives us meaning and pushes that terror to the back of our mind and allows us to get out of bed every morning. 

Ok, so that’s pretty intense to realize that existential dread resonates through every waking hour of our lives. But that realization compels us to manage that fear, and one of the main ways we do that is by connecting with things that give meaning, purpose and value to our lives. So what are those things? Well, humans’ innate drive for self-preservation has led to the creation of societies and the culture that comes with them, like laws, religions and other belief systems, art, crafts, music, thought, literature, technology, and frankly all the things that have ever been dreamt of, created, and invented. These are the outgrowth of our desire to do things that will outlive us, and in that way we become immortal. The psychiatrist and author Robert Jay Lifton refers to this as “symbolic immortality.” Think about how good you feel when you accomplish something, especially if you know it’s something that’s going to influence others and be around for a while. That elevation in your self-esteem causes your anxiety levels to drop, at least momentarily. Solomon and his colleagues discussed this phenomenon and theorized that when thoughts of death arise in people, they often do or think or create something that causes their self-esteem to rise in order to quiet that anxiety. Now, we aren’t consciously thinking something like, “Well, I better bake this cake because I’m good at it, and I feel good when I do it, and it will stop me from thinking about my eventual death.” It’s not that obvious; nevertheless, it’s there, under the surface. But when we manage our existential dread in this way, we are adding not just to our own worth as a person, but potentially adding something to the experience of other people (especially if we give them a slice of that yummy cake); and if we write that recipe down and it gets passed from our kids to our grandkids and so on, we symbolically live on every time someone pulls out that recipe and bakes that cake.

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Just as existential dread has the potential to motivate us to do positive things in order to make us feel better about ourselves, it can also, unfortunately, cause us to do things that are harmful. David Robson says that the terror associated with these existential threats can lead us to becoming more closed-minded and dogmatic in our opinions and give us less ability to see the nuances of life, instead only seeing things as either black or white, wrong or right, with nothing in between. In one of the first studies done by Solomon and his colleagues, municipal court judges were divided into an experimental group and a control group. In the experimental group, the judges were first asked to describe the emotions that the thought of their own death aroused in them. The control group was asked a different question, one that did not cause them to think about their death. Then both groups of judges were given a fictional legal case that was typical of the kind they would see on a daily basis, and they were asked what bond should be set for the defendant, who had been arrested for prostitution. The judges who were reminded of death set an average bond of $455, but the judges in the control group who were not reminded of their mortality set an average bond of only $50 for the same case. Solomon said that they chose judges to study because they are “rigorously trained to make rational and uniform decisions based solely on evidence relative to existing laws,” but there was nothing uniform about the bond amounts set by the two groups of judges. The ones who were primed to think of their mortality were far more punitive than the control group, in fact nine times more punitive. The moral nature of the crime, prostitution, was also important to show the dogmatism and close-mindedness of the primed judges as compared to the control group. When they thought about their own death, they were more judgmental and punitive towards the defendant, who, in the minds of some people anyway, had committed a moral sin. 

Another way that we manage existential dread is to connect ourselves with others who are like us, who share things like our nationality, our religion, or our preferred politics. And while that tends to make us feel like we are a part of something bigger than ourselves, and thereby makes our mortality less scary, it can also lead to hostility against anyone who we don’t see as being a member of our group. Terror management research has consistently found that human beings cling more closely to the ideals and beliefs of their own group and become more distrustful and hostile toward other groups when they are reminded of their own mortality. And this can lead to rewarding those who exemplify certain attributes and beliefs that we find acceptable, while punishing those who don’t adhere to our particular worldview. Even if they’ve done nothing to us, we still may be convinced to be fearful of them and believe that they intend to harm us; I’ll link to the story of one Rwanda genocide survivor who watched as many of her family were killed by people in her own neighborhood, people she had gone to school with and socialized with who had been convinced by the government-controlled media that the Tutsi tribe to which she belonged was evil and dangerous. Rwanda still hasn’t come to terms with what happened there, almost 30 years later. Now, with the advent of social media, it’s even easier for fearful people to find and cling to their “group” and lash out at others who they see as different and therefore bad.  I know, it seems unbelievable that being afraid of your own eventual death, even on a subconscious level, might lead you to justify causing harm to someone. Now, it’s true that the vast majority of people don’t end up acting on those feelings. But history shows that it can happen, and if you think that you would never do such a thing, a lot of people who participated in those horrors would have said the same thing about themselves at some point. So it’s definitely something to be aware of.

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As we struggle to search for meaning in the face of uncertainty, we can become more susceptible to problematic behaviors and ideas. We’ve seen this firsthand in the past few years as we struggled with the Covid 19 pandemic. A 2021 article by the original researchers of terror management theory looked at the effects of the pandemic as it related to the fear of our own mortality. They argue that the unprecedented nature of the pandemic made it impossible to ignore death or relegate it to the background noise of our lives. For the many millions of us who were affected by the shutdown, we couldn’t do things like go to work, go out to dinner, hang out with friends, or indeed do most things that were important sources of self-esteem. We were forced to stare our potential death, as well as the deaths of our loved ones, right in the face. Combined with the initial, sometimes contradictory information given to us by governments and health care providers, the world was suddenly more chaotic and hostile, and many people simply didn’t have the means to validate their existence in the ways they normally had. So there was a big increase in behaviors like alcohol consumption, excessive eating and binge watching television as people looked for diversions to get them through the days. There were also rises in opiate use and online gambling. One defensive tactic used by some people was outright denial of the problem, minimizing the threat by saying that it wasn’t that contagious or deadly, that health experts were overstating its danger, or even calling it a politically motivated conspiracy. When confronted with statistics like hospitalization or death rates, those same people insisted that hospitals were inflating those statistics to get more money, or to undermine government leaders. This same distrust of government and medical leaders led other people who were particularly vulnerable to fear and anxiety to practice unhelpful and even dangerous defenses like gargling bleach or taking certain drugs off-label to try to avoid getting Covid or to treat it themselves. 

On a positive note, there is evidence that most people channeled their anxiety in ways that were not so problematic. The great majority of the population (up to 92%, in fact), handled their fear of Covid 19 during the pandemic by following the advice of the medical community, increasing their sanitation practices, wearing masks, and going out in public only as necessary. Now, they may not have followed all of this advice all of the time in all circumstances, but most people generally tried to avoid getting themselves or others sick in these more effective ways. They also channeled their desire for validity into creative home-based pusuits like cooking and baking, making art, redecorating, gardening, and exercising; and satisfied their need to be around others who validated them by doing things like outdoor activities and virtual meetups. Humans are resilient and resourceful creatures, and our need to feel that our lives have meaning can often lead to these kinds of creative outcomes.

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In this episode, we’ve seen examples of how existential dread can bring out both the best and the worst in humanity. Fear of our own mortality can lead to low-level, continual stress and depression; if that goes unchecked it can turn into hopelessness and despair.  It can also cause us to fear and hate others who are different from us; and unchecked, it drags us to the very depths of which humanity is capable. And I don’t want to go there; I would hope that you don’t either. 

I choose to end this episode by focusing on ways that you and I can conquer our underlying fear of death (or at least, mitigate it) by turning feelings of despair into acts of creation; choosing to do things that touch others in a positive way and might even outlast us. I often think of the amazing cave paintings in Lescaux France; they are around 17000 years old. We don’t know exactly why these beautiful paintings of animals were created by obviously skilled artists, and we certainly don’t know the names of those artists, yet we can imagine the lives they lived simply by looking at what they left behind. The people who created that art live on, many millenia later.

In my life, I like to think that while I’m definitely an imperfect human, I’ve done a few things to make the world a little bit better. I think I did that as a former actor, I made characters come to life and I know I provided entertainment and joy to a lot of people. As a college professor, I do it by showing people how they can be their best selves and improve their future careers. As a podcaster, I give my students as well as other people information that could make a huge difference in their lives and their interactions with others. And if you can see that the things you do that bring you joy are acts of creativity and you pursue those things as part of your lifestyle, the effects of that creativity can only be positive. This includes everyday acts like baking that cake, or journaling, or taking up crocheting and making a blanket, or maybe finally sitting down to write that screenplay, or starting that YouTube channel, or any infinite number of small or large, wonderful things that you can do--those are the things that give us meaning and can outlive us. We don’t last forever, but our positive thoughts and actions can make a difference for others long into the future. And I hope you take something positive from this episode of Think It Through.