The human mind is aware of its own mortality, and that’s scary. We strive to manage this fear all the time, and a popular solution is to project it onto politics. Thinking the world is in decline distracts you from your own decline. Thinking the country is going to hell in a hand-basket is less painful than accepting the evidence of mortality in yourself.
You’re seen as virtuous if you worry about the state of the world, but if you worry about your own decline, you’re seen as selfish and weak. This is all the more incentive to focus on the world’s downhill slide rather than your own.
You think you’re serving a greater good when you do this, but it does more harm than good. It injects politics with the angst sparked by our mortality fears. We have life-or-death feelings about every political contest because we won’t see the true cause of those feelings.
Everyone ends up believing that the fate of the world hangs on a win for their preferred policies. This does not lead to healthy civic problem-solving. We would be better off accepting our natural survival fears than projecting them onto politics.
Death was easier to accept in past generations because people died at home. Children even died in the bed they shared with siblings. Before the invention of X-rays and MRIs, you never knew if a twinge of pain was the beginning of the end, so you learned to manage your fear of death instead of running from it.
A new book on death helped me do that: “Land of the Dead: How the West Changed Death in America.” It explains the colossal death rate among the 49ers who flooded into California after the discovery of gold. The lethal threats they faced en route and after they arrived were astounding to me. And I learned that early San Franciscans literally stepped over dead bodies because there was no proper burial system. Today, Californians panic over tiny risks, as if getting irate can make you immortal.
Our natural survival fear is easier to manage when you know how our brain produces it. We humans have two brains: a cortex that’s unique to humans and a limbic system shared with animals. Animals are not aware of death because they don’t have the cortex necessary to produce abstractions. They still panic when they see a threat, but only when the threat reaches their senses. We humans can panic all the time because we can generate threat signals in our big cortex when they’re not actually present. We send this self-created message to our limbic system, and it releases threat chemicals that make it feel real.
Animals relax once they escape from a threat, but we humans move on to find another potential threat. Your cortisol turns on, which makes the threat feel so real that you don’t know you’ve created it with your own thoughts. Your intelligent cortex tries to help by finding more information about the threat. You are good at finding evidence when you look!
We focus on prevention in the modern world, and we often succeed at preventing lethal threats. But something will get you eventually, so prevention can’t relieve the nagging fear. Prevention increases the fear in a way, because we end up thinking about it more often. Shakespeare said it best: “A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant only taste of death but once.”
Another modern strategy is to make the most of the time you have. This has benefits, but it adds to your stress when you can’t control your time. You will waste time in traffic and at the DMV site, and you will feel like it’s killing you if you rely on time management to relieve your mortality fears.
You’re better off accepting your mortality instead of always running from it.
That’s hard to do when everyone around you blames politics for their angst. These conversations bring a perverse kind of relief: You feel like you won’t be missing much when you’re gone, because everything is falling apart anyway. But they cause you to have survival-threat feelings whenever you hear the 24/7 news.
It’s hard to accept that the world will spin on when you’re gone, but accepting it will give you some peace during the time that you have.
