7 ms·

Terror management theory

132 points by _Microft 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
sillysaurusx 7y ago
Hi HN. I’m feeling sad today. I just wanted to say that I hope all of you are having a good weekend and working on interesting projects or just enjoying life. Be good to yourselves!
- _aravindc26 7y ago
  Hey man. You'll get through! Wish you the best.
- brycehalley 7y ago
  Hang in there, and I hope the same for you!
- coleifer 7y ago
  When my son was 3 he told me after a pet had died, "it's ok to be sad sometimes".
- ellius 7y ago
  I was hit hard by melancholy a few days ago. Thanks for the well wishes, sympathies from Ohio and I hope your pain mellows.
- rinchik 7y ago
  https://www.talkspace.com/ https://www.talkspace.com/ is for feeling sad, not HN. HNers are here for the intellectual stimuli and thus may not give you what you are looking for.
  - modwest 7y ago
    Nice self-fulfilling prophecy there.
  - aloknnikhil 7y ago
    I think it's ok to be human for a minute, even for HN.
    - stallmanite 7y ago
      Much like Stack Overflow I think HN could actually be more useful if it lightened up a little. It needn’t instantly degenerate to reddit if a joke or feelings are allowed.
  - dang 7y ago
    It's ok to feel things on HN. Intellectual curiosity, the core value of the site, is a feeling.
  - HocusLocus 7y ago
    They're trying to gather all the sadness on Talkspace so it can some day be subject to a sudden shut down and sadness will be eliminated, forever! Likewise for intellectual stimuli, on HN.
jger15 7y ago
Denial of Death by Ernest Becker is a great read.
- dang 7y ago
  I read it (well, parts) on a long plane ride recently. It's an interesting book—very 1970s and very much looking back to the existential psychotherapists and psychoanalysts of the mid-20th century. I do not say that as a bad thing, on the contrary. What surprised me most is how big a role Otto Rank plays in it. I only knew of Rank as the originator of the birth trauma theory and thought he was a minor disciple of Freud. Becker regards Rank as the greatest figure in the tradition after Freud if not greater. It made me want to learn more about Rank's work.
  - 9214 7y ago
    Rank's "The Myth of the Birth of the Hero" elaborates what Becker meant by "society as a heroic system", to a certain degree. I myself still in pursue of "Art & Artist" paper copy, regarded as his magnum opus.
- 9214 7y ago
  Came here to say exactly that.
vearwhershuh 7y ago
Terror Management Theory is recursive.
rinchik 7y ago
Interesting, "Terror management theory" is not what i expected it to be. Probably influenced by the modern history and current dynamics, I didn't expect it to be about evolutionary psychology or death-related cognitions, I expected macro-economics and political theory.
- H8crilA 7y ago
  Well according to that theory things like nation states or big economic interests or religions exist because of death anxiety. So yeah, going to a political rally or protesting civil rights abuses even if you're not abused, participating in wars, etc. is triggered by death anxiety and the need to do "something more". "We go out of our course to make ourselves uncomfortable; the cup of life is not bitter enough to our palate, and we distill superfluous poison to put into it, or conjure up hideous things to frighten ourselves at, which would never exist if we did not make them." Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles Mackay, 1841
  - rinchik 7y ago
    > things like nation states or big economic interests or religions exist because of death anxiety Interesting, it makes sense on the surface but not if you dig dipper. I doubt that this fear has ANY impact on nation states or big economics, fear of death is very well situated and certain conditions must be met to trigger it, meaning it's not predictable, not constant, and can not be a major driver in global politics or economics. Sex and mating on the other hand, is a completely different story, I find the idea of sex being the major factor, influencer, and driver behind global trends and economics a lot more plausible (I'm a Freud's fan)
    - AQuantized 7y ago
      Much of the evidence supporting TMT shows things such as people behaving significantly differently when even subtly primed with thoughts of their mortality, such as driving past a graveyard. At the end of the day it's always going to be a theory within which that evidence finds its explanation, but it's perhaps more compelling than the alternatives.
baron_harkonnen 7y ago
What's really interesting to me that psychology twitter seems to have a rabid hatred for TMT which I find really strange since, at the very least, Becker's book (the Denial of Death) lays out a pretty reasonable foundation (much more reasonably than the vast majority of psych papers I've read) for a lot of human psychological behavior. Becker's view is pretty straight forward: We cannot incorporate a true understanding of our inevitable death into our psyche and function, so basically a huge amount of the complexity of our psychology is based in ways our mind is able to divert accepting this reality. When I was younger I though "fear of death" was a wildly over blown notion (I remember reading Delillo's White Noise and thinking "is death that scary?"). But as I got older, and started having friends die, I realized that in youth I was just much more deeply in denial of death. Needless to say I think Becker makes a good point. For me, the violent reaction by the psychology community against TMT seems to only add validity to Becker's idea. We really can't deal with the reality of our own personal death, and that is so strong that on an intellectual level we immediately was to laugh off the idea so that we don't have to face that this might even be the case.
- AQuantized 7y ago
  Is it possibly due to a lot of the psychoanalytic language Becker uses? I'm uncertain how psychoanalysis is generally viewed by the presumably relatively young twitter psychologists, but I wouldn't expect it to be in fashion. The Worm at the Core presents a more modern, evidence-based to TMT, but I don't know if it's widely read.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- thedstrat 7y ago
  What does it actually mean to “be in denial of death” though? How does our mind divert accepting this reality? I’ve never experienced that; it sounds somewhat dramatic.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    You don't think about it much. You see death, you hear or read about death, and it doesn't register emotionally. The concept of your own death seems too distant to worry about. That's what I understood GP to mean, though there's another form of death denial: all the stories people invent about "death giving meaning to life", about "great circle of life", or the various reasons people give to dismiss the idea that we should focus a bit more on working towards extending life.
AmphibianTree 7y ago
This was pretty good … https://www.npr.org/2019/09/13/760599683/were-all-gonna-die-how-fear-of-death-drives-our-behavior https://www.npr.org/2019/09/13/760599683/were-all-gonna-die-...
Razengan 7y ago
At the core, every sentient being loves being alive, and every mind wishes to be immortal, and not be lonely. All the icky crap comes from knowing that can't be. The subconscious dread of death is also a form of the Fear of Missing Out. How much cool tech and new discoveries will there be after us? I for one cannot cope with the possibility that I may never get to see a proper ending to Game of Thrones or a good Dungeons & Dragons movie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > The subconscious dread of death is also a form of the Fear of Missing Out. That is true. I've been thinking about death more in the recent years, and most recently, the thinking focused on ideas like "if there's no afterlife, I wish there was at least a 'high score' screen, and a way to see how did the rest of humanity fare, how life looks a hundred thousand years from now".
- zaat 7y ago
  >At the core, every sentient being loves being alive, and every mind wishes to be immortal, and not be lonely. This is a strong universal claim about a fact, and I'm pretty sure that it is not true. While probably generally true for young people, research on older people suggest that not everyone wishes to be immortal and some are actually in peace with the approaching end of their life. Just one result from a quick search: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0150686 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=info:doi/10.137...
  - afshin 7y ago
    I agree with you. The only universal thing that could be said of any conscious entity is that it is capable of experience. No other aspect of consciousness (e.g. fear of ceasing to exist) could be claimed to be a universal.
  - Razengan 7y ago
    > * While probably generally true for young people, research on older people suggests that not everyone wishes to be immortal* Exactly, by very definition of getting "older", they already know it's damn well not going to happen. They feel their frailty and corporeal limitations, and have lost other people to mortality, so they learn to cope with it, via the very topic of this post: Terror management or whatever you want to call it. I said at the core, because the purpose of any mind is to, well, mind. If a mind wishes to cease to exist, it's because it's unable to attain its desires and knows it will never have enough time (for some, to even find a desire in the first place.) I've always been fairly morbid myself. If given a choice, I'd choose to be immortal or never have come into existence at all, rather than this temporal teaser. Like the comment below by rinchik [0], our global culture encourages every mind to .. succumb. We're discouraged from feeling, from the core essence of sentient existence. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21298809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21298809
airocker 7y ago
“We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.” -- Confucius
phkahler 7y ago
The word suicide does not appear on that wikipedia page. I'm curious how that phenomenon fits with TMT being all about death avoidance. It seems like something that should be covered.
Gusen 7y ago
So how do we handle this terror? Must see PDF here: Listen to President Donald Trump demand a $4 billion dollar bribe from child rapists to "turn a blind eye" on January 3, 2019. Download the video, turn the volume all the way up and put head phones on. Trump is on a call from with Henry Porter and Gigi Hadid. (Page 63) Bribe demand @1018am https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Grdr8xF2psKNsuYlEnl9dIRV-77YG0Vr/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Grdr8xF2psKNsuYlEnl9dIRV-77... This is the tip of the iceberg. PDF link below: Full 84 page document [updated 9Sep]: FBI_FinalDraft_26Jul2019_BSchlenker.pdf https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Sj9EN_pHmicKS6rFQlmk67knMdJc9cGk/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Sj9EN_pHmicKS6rFQlmk67knMdJ...
carapace 7y ago
If God is a stranger, Death is an enemy. When God is a Friend, Death is a friend.
jariel 7y ago
To the extent that people believe that they are part of a much greater whole, then this takes on an entirely different context.
pmoriarty 7y ago
"But on further consideration, when, after finding the cause of all our ills, I have sought to discover the reason of it, I have found that there is one very real reason, namely, the natural poverty of our feeble and mortal condition, so miserable that nothing can comfort us when we think of it closely. Whatever condition we picture to ourselves, if we muster all the good things which it is possible to possess, royalty is the finest position in the world. Yet, when we imagine a king attended with every pleasure he can feel, if he be without diversion, and be left to consider and reflect on what he is, this feeble happiness will not sustain him; he will necessarily fall into forebodings of dangers, of revolutions which may happen, and, finally, of death and inevitable disease; so that if he be without what is called diversion, he is unhappy, and more unhappy than the least of his subjects who plays and diverts himself. Hence it comes that play and the society of women, war, and high posts, are so sought after. Not that there is in fact any happiness in them, or that men imagine true bliss to consist in money won at play, or in the hare which they hunt; we would not take these as a gift. We do not seek that easy and peaceful lot which permits us to think of our unhappy condition, nor the dangers of war, nor the labour of office, but the bustle which averts these thoughts of ours, and amuses us. Hence it comes that men so much love noise and stir; hence it comes that the prison is so horrible a punishment; hence it comes that the pleasure of solitude is a thing incomprehensible. And it is in fact the greatest source of happiness in the condition of kings, that men try incessantly to divert them, and to procure for them all kinds of pleasures. The king is surrounded by persons whose only thought is to divert the king, and to prevent his thinking of self. For he is unhappy, king though he be, if he think of himself. This is all that men have been able to discover to make themselves happy. And those who philosophise on the matter, and who think men unreasonable for spending a whole day in chasing a hare which they would not have bought, scarce know our nature. The hare in itself would not screen us from the sight of death and calamities; but the chase which turns away our attention from these, does screen us." Blaise Pascal, 1670
sysbin 7y ago
TMT exists because of the delusion people have from thinking free will is a real thing. Once the illusion of having free will breaks, understanding of how death will come and just how every event happens in your life happens by fate. Although, I think my fear of death went away when thinking about infinity and how the universe can repeat the conditions that made this very life occur for eternity.
magwa101 7y ago
Love it, agree with it, can't face death, no fucking way. Motivates me to work out every day.

132 points by _Microft 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Hi HN. I’m feeling sad today. I just wanted to say that I hope all of you are having a good weekend and working on interesting projects or just enjoying life. Be good to yourselves!

_aravindc26 7y ago
Hey man. You'll get through! Wish you the best.
brycehalley 7y ago
Hang in there, and I hope the same for you!
coleifer 7y ago
When my son was 3 he told me after a pet had died, "it's ok to be sad sometimes".
ellius 7y ago
I was hit hard by melancholy a few days ago. Thanks for the well wishes, sympathies from Ohio and I hope your pain mellows.
rinchik 7y ago
https://www.talkspace.com/ https://www.talkspace.com/ is for feeling sad, not HN. HNers are here for the intellectual stimuli and thus may not give you what you are looking for.
- modwest 7y ago
  Nice self-fulfilling prophecy there.
- aloknnikhil 7y ago
  I think it's ok to be human for a minute, even for HN.
  - stallmanite 7y ago
    Much like Stack Overflow I think HN could actually be more useful if it lightened up a little. It needn’t instantly degenerate to reddit if a joke or feelings are allowed.
- dang 7y ago
  It's ok to feel things on HN. Intellectual curiosity, the core value of the site, is a feeling.
- HocusLocus 7y ago
  They're trying to gather all the sadness on Talkspace so it can some day be subject to a sudden shut down and sadness will be eliminated, forever! Likewise for intellectual stimuli, on HN.

jger15 7y ago

Denial of Death by Ernest Becker is a great read.

dang 7y ago
I read it (well, parts) on a long plane ride recently. It's an interesting book—very 1970s and very much looking back to the existential psychotherapists and psychoanalysts of the mid-20th century. I do not say that as a bad thing, on the contrary. What surprised me most is how big a role Otto Rank plays in it. I only knew of Rank as the originator of the birth trauma theory and thought he was a minor disciple of Freud. Becker regards Rank as the greatest figure in the tradition after Freud if not greater. It made me want to learn more about Rank's work.
- 9214 7y ago
  Rank's "The Myth of the Birth of the Hero" elaborates what Becker meant by "society as a heroic system", to a certain degree. I myself still in pursue of "Art & Artist" paper copy, regarded as his magnum opus.
9214 7y ago
Came here to say exactly that.

vearwhershuh 7y ago

Terror Management Theory is recursive.

rinchik 7y ago

Interesting, "Terror management theory" is not what i expected it to be. Probably influenced by the modern history and current dynamics, I didn't expect it to be about evolutionary psychology or death-related cognitions, I expected macro-economics and political theory.

H8crilA 7y ago
Well according to that theory things like nation states or big economic interests or religions exist because of death anxiety. So yeah, going to a political rally or protesting civil rights abuses even if you're not abused, participating in wars, etc. is triggered by death anxiety and the need to do "something more". "We go out of our course to make ourselves uncomfortable; the cup of life is not bitter enough to our palate, and we distill superfluous poison to put into it, or conjure up hideous things to frighten ourselves at, which would never exist if we did not make them." Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles Mackay, 1841
- rinchik 7y ago
  > things like nation states or big economic interests or religions exist because of death anxiety Interesting, it makes sense on the surface but not if you dig dipper. I doubt that this fear has ANY impact on nation states or big economics, fear of death is very well situated and certain conditions must be met to trigger it, meaning it's not predictable, not constant, and can not be a major driver in global politics or economics. Sex and mating on the other hand, is a completely different story, I find the idea of sex being the major factor, influencer, and driver behind global trends and economics a lot more plausible (I'm a Freud's fan)
  - AQuantized 7y ago
    Much of the evidence supporting TMT shows things such as people behaving significantly differently when even subtly primed with thoughts of their mortality, such as driving past a graveyard. At the end of the day it's always going to be a theory within which that evidence finds its explanation, but it's perhaps more compelling than the alternatives.

baron_harkonnen 7y ago

What's really interesting to me that psychology twitter seems to have a rabid hatred for TMT which I find really strange since, at the very least, Becker's book (the Denial of Death) lays out a pretty reasonable foundation (much more reasonably than the vast majority of psych papers I've read) for a lot of human psychological behavior. Becker's view is pretty straight forward: We cannot incorporate a true understanding of our inevitable death into our psyche and function, so basically a huge amount of the complexity of our psychology is based in ways our mind is able to divert accepting this reality. When I was younger I though "fear of death" was a wildly over blown notion (I remember reading Delillo's White Noise and thinking "is death that scary?"). But as I got older, and started having friends die, I realized that in youth I was just much more deeply in denial of death. Needless to say I think Becker makes a good point. For me, the violent reaction by the psychology community against TMT seems to only add validity to Becker's idea. We really can't deal with the reality of our own personal death, and that is so strong that on an intellectual level we immediately was to laugh off the idea so that we don't have to face that this might even be the case.

AQuantized 7y ago
Is it possibly due to a lot of the psychoanalytic language Becker uses? I'm uncertain how psychoanalysis is generally viewed by the presumably relatively young twitter psychologists, but I wouldn't expect it to be in fashion. The Worm at the Core presents a more modern, evidence-based to TMT, but I don't know if it's widely read.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
thedstrat 7y ago
What does it actually mean to “be in denial of death” though? How does our mind divert accepting this reality? I’ve never experienced that; it sounds somewhat dramatic.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  You don't think about it much. You see death, you hear or read about death, and it doesn't register emotionally. The concept of your own death seems too distant to worry about. That's what I understood GP to mean, though there's another form of death denial: all the stories people invent about "death giving meaning to life", about "great circle of life", or the various reasons people give to dismiss the idea that we should focus a bit more on working towards extending life.

AmphibianTree 7y ago

This was pretty good … https://www.npr.org/2019/09/13/760599683/were-all-gonna-die-how-fear-of-death-drives-our-behavior https://www.npr.org/2019/09/13/760599683/were-all-gonna-die-...

Razengan 7y ago

At the core, every sentient being loves being alive, and every mind wishes to be immortal, and not be lonely. All the icky crap comes from knowing that can't be. The subconscious dread of death is also a form of the Fear of Missing Out. How much cool tech and new discoveries will there be after us? I for one cannot cope with the possibility that I may never get to see a proper ending to Game of Thrones or a good Dungeons & Dragons movie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out

TeMPOraL 7y ago
> The subconscious dread of death is also a form of the Fear of Missing Out. That is true. I've been thinking about death more in the recent years, and most recently, the thinking focused on ideas like "if there's no afterlife, I wish there was at least a 'high score' screen, and a way to see how did the rest of humanity fare, how life looks a hundred thousand years from now".
zaat 7y ago
>At the core, every sentient being loves being alive, and every mind wishes to be immortal, and not be lonely. This is a strong universal claim about a fact, and I'm pretty sure that it is not true. While probably generally true for young people, research on older people suggest that not everyone wishes to be immortal and some are actually in peace with the approaching end of their life. Just one result from a quick search: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0150686 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=info:doi/10.137...
- afshin 7y ago
  I agree with you. The only universal thing that could be said of any conscious entity is that it is capable of experience. No other aspect of consciousness (e.g. fear of ceasing to exist) could be claimed to be a universal.
- Razengan 7y ago
  > * While probably generally true for young people, research on older people suggests that not everyone wishes to be immortal* Exactly, by very definition of getting "older", they already know it's damn well not going to happen. They feel their frailty and corporeal limitations, and have lost other people to mortality, so they learn to cope with it, via the very topic of this post: Terror management or whatever you want to call it. I said at the core, because the purpose of any mind is to, well, mind. If a mind wishes to cease to exist, it's because it's unable to attain its desires and knows it will never have enough time (for some, to even find a desire in the first place.) I've always been fairly morbid myself. If given a choice, I'd choose to be immortal or never have come into existence at all, rather than this temporal teaser. Like the comment below by rinchik [0], our global culture encourages every mind to .. succumb. We're discouraged from feeling, from the core essence of sentient existence. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21298809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21298809

airocker 7y ago

“We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.” -- Confucius

phkahler 7y ago

The word suicide does not appear on that wikipedia page. I'm curious how that phenomenon fits with TMT being all about death avoidance. It seems like something that should be covered.

Gusen 7y ago

So how do we handle this terror? Must see PDF here: Listen to President Donald Trump demand a $4 billion dollar bribe from child rapists to "turn a blind eye" on January 3, 2019. Download the video, turn the volume all the way up and put head phones on. Trump is on a call from with Henry Porter and Gigi Hadid. (Page 63) Bribe demand @1018am https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Grdr8xF2psKNsuYlEnl9dIRV-77YG0Vr/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Grdr8xF2psKNsuYlEnl9dIRV-77... This is the tip of the iceberg. PDF link below: Full 84 page document [updated 9Sep]: FBI_FinalDraft_26Jul2019_BSchlenker.pdf https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Sj9EN_pHmicKS6rFQlmk67knMdJc9cGk/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Sj9EN_pHmicKS6rFQlmk67knMdJ...

carapace 7y ago

If God is a stranger, Death is an enemy. When God is a Friend, Death is a friend.

jariel 7y ago

To the extent that people believe that they are part of a much greater whole, then this takes on an entirely different context.

pmoriarty 7y ago

"But on further consideration, when, after finding the cause of all our ills, I have sought to discover the reason of it, I have found that there is one very real reason, namely, the natural poverty of our feeble and mortal condition, so miserable that nothing can comfort us when we think of it closely. Whatever condition we picture to ourselves, if we muster all the good things which it is possible to possess, royalty is the finest position in the world. Yet, when we imagine a king attended with every pleasure he can feel, if he be without diversion, and be left to consider and reflect on what he is, this feeble happiness will not sustain him; he will necessarily fall into forebodings of dangers, of revolutions which may happen, and, finally, of death and inevitable disease; so that if he be without what is called diversion, he is unhappy, and more unhappy than the least of his subjects who plays and diverts himself. Hence it comes that play and the society of women, war, and high posts, are so sought after. Not that there is in fact any happiness in them, or that men imagine true bliss to consist in money won at play, or in the hare which they hunt; we would not take these as a gift. We do not seek that easy and peaceful lot which permits us to think of our unhappy condition, nor the dangers of war, nor the labour of office, but the bustle which averts these thoughts of ours, and amuses us. Hence it comes that men so much love noise and stir; hence it comes that the prison is so horrible a punishment; hence it comes that the pleasure of solitude is a thing incomprehensible. And it is in fact the greatest source of happiness in the condition of kings, that men try incessantly to divert them, and to procure for them all kinds of pleasures. The king is surrounded by persons whose only thought is to divert the king, and to prevent his thinking of self. For he is unhappy, king though he be, if he think of himself. This is all that men have been able to discover to make themselves happy. And those who philosophise on the matter, and who think men unreasonable for spending a whole day in chasing a hare which they would not have bought, scarce know our nature. The hare in itself would not screen us from the sight of death and calamities; but the chase which turns away our attention from these, does screen us." Blaise Pascal, 1670

sysbin 7y ago

TMT exists because of the delusion people have from thinking free will is a real thing. Once the illusion of having free will breaks, understanding of how death will come and just how every event happens in your life happens by fate. Although, I think my fear of death went away when thinking about infinity and how the universe can repeat the conditions that made this very life occur for eternity.

magwa101 7y ago

Love it, agree with it, can't face death, no fucking way. Motivates me to work out every day.