But perhaps not more bothersome than other threats to meaning. Heine says Meaning Maintenance Model studies have found that thinking about death does not have a noticeably larger effect on people's attitudes and behaviors than, say, watching a surreal movie. A metareview of TMT studies also notes that the effects of thinking about death are less significant when compared with thinking about something else that threatens someone's sense of meaning.
Thoughts of death still lead people to uphold their worldviews according to this theory, but it’s because, when faced with an idea as confounding as one's own mortality, people turn to the other things in their lives that still make sense to them. While the two theories have a lot in common, Heine says MMM can explain one thing that TMT cannot: suicide.
“TMT would argue that while we want to have a sense of meaning as a way of keeping away thoughts of death, one of the key motivators of suicide is feeling that your life isn’t very meaningful, wanting death when you feel like you don’t have sufficient meaning in your life," he says.
The thing that makes death different, Heine says, is that it’s not solvable. With other meaning threats, you can try to fix the problem, or adjust your worldview to accommodate the new information. “The fact that we’re going to die is a problem that we can never fully resolve throughout our lives,” he says.
But maybe that’s for the best.
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“I know we’re supposed to be super afraid of death. But it’s good, isn’t it?” asks Laura King, curator’s professor of psychological sciences at the University of Missouri, Columbia. “If life never ended, think about it, right? Isn’t that like every vampire story or sci-fi movie? If you live too long, after a while, you just lose it. Life no longer has any meaning, because it’s commonplace.”
King did a study in 2009 that offers an alternative, economical perspective on death and meaning. She showed that after reminders of death, people valued life more highly―and conversely, reading a passage that placed a high monetary value on the human body increased people’s number of death thoughts. This is the scarcity principle, plain and simple―the less you have of something, the more you value it.
But “most of us don’t live like we’re aware that life is a finite commodity,” King says. She describes an exercise she has her students do, in which they write down their life goals, and then write what they’d do if they only had three weeks to live. “Then you say, ‘Why aren’t you doing those things?’ They say, ‘Get real, hello, we have a future to plan for.’”
“Everybody always says life is too short, but it's really long. It's really, really long.”
“Live every day as though it’s your last” is nice but profoundly unhelpful advice, when you know that today is probably not your last day. I’m not sure what I’d do if I was going to die tomorrow―round up all my loved ones and fly them to Paris? Or maybe just throw them a really nice dinner party, the kind where everyone ends up sprawled out on couches, overstuffed and warm from the wine.
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Either way, I can’t do that today. I have to go to work.
“Everybody always says life is too short,” King says, “but it’s really long. It’s really, really long.”
Once people’s days truly are numbered, their priorities do seem to shift. According to research done on socioemotional selectivity theory, older people are more present-oriented than younger people, and are more selective in who they spend time with, sticking mostly with family and old, close friends. Other studies have shown them to also be more forgiving, and to care more for others, and less about enhancing themselves.
This all fits in well with Irvine’s Stoic philosophy. Rather than pulling curtains over the darkness on the other side of the window, you stare straight into it, so when you turn away you’re thankful for the light.
Irvine gives the mundane example of buying a lawn mower. “As I’m doing it, I have the realization that this is conceivably the last lawn mower I will ever buy,” he says. “I don’t like mowing the lawn, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve only got X number of times it’s going to happen. Some day, this moment, right now, is going to count as the good old days."
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Unfortunately, Western culture isn’t exactly death-friendly. Death is kept largely out of sight, out of mind, the details left to hospitals and funeral parlors. Though most Americans say they want to die at home, few actually do―only about 25 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Most other people die in hospitals, nursing homes, or other facilities.
This is why, in 2011, the mortician Caitlin Doughty founded The Order of the Good Death, a self-described “group of funeral industry professionals, academics, and artists exploring ways to prepare a death-phobic culture for inevitable mortality.” She’s also written a book about working in a crematory, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, and hosts the “Ask a Mortician” webseries.
“Death doesn't go away just because we hide it,” Doughty wrote to me in an email. “Hiding life's truths doesn't mean they disappear. It means they are forced into darker parts of our consciousness … Death is the most natural thing in the world, and treating it as deviant isn't doing our culture any favors … We don't control nature. We aren't higher-ranking than nature.”
This is terror management writ large, a culture that pushes death away as best it can. Even though, ultimately, it can’t.
More people are coming around to Doughty’s way of thinking. “Death salons” and “death cafes,” where people gather to talk about their mortality have sprung up across the U.S., and many doctors, like the Being Mortal author Atul Gawande, are working to advance the conversation around end-of-life care, getting patients involved in planning for their deaths.
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But the research shows the effects of thinking about death aren't all grace and gratitude ―so would bringing death out into the open ultimately help or hurt humanity?
“At first, thinking about death regularly made me move up and down and way up and way down the emotional spectrum,” Doughty writes. “But over time thinking about death moves you closer to magnanimity. You realize that you will have to give your body, your atoms and molecules, back to the universe when you're done with them.”
She also points out that TMT studies are isolated instances, and don't look at what happens when people think about death regularly, over time.
Maybe the key, then, is being deliberate. Not letting thoughts of death sneak up on you, but actively engaging with them, even if it’s hard. In one 2010 study, people who were more mindful were less defensive of their worldviews after being reminded of death, suggesting that “mindfulness can potentially disrupt some of these kinds of processes that go into terror management,” says Vail, the Cleveland State University psychologist.
Solomon, too, is hopeful. “I like to think there comes a moment where sustained efforts to come to terms with death pay off.” Vail suggests that freeing oneself from the psychological reactions to death might get rid of the good effects along with the bad, but Solomon’s willing to take the trade. “If you look at the problems that currently befall humanity―we can’t get along with each other, we’re pissing on the environment, [there’s] rampant economic instability by virtue of mindless conspicuous consumption―they’re all malignant manifestations of death anxiety running amok.”
It’s probably not possible to erase all fear of death―animals have a drive to survive, and we are animals, even with all that consciousness. Even if being mindful about death means getting rid of the good along with the bad consequences of death anxiety, people can be generous and love each other without being scared into it.
"Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him," E.M. Forster once wrote. I don't know if there's really any salvation, but if we accept death, maybe we can just live.
About the Author:
Julie Beck is a senior associate editor at The Atlantic, where she oversees the Health Channel.
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