How Death and Anxiety Help Us Live Authentically: Part 1
How do humans acquire self-esteem?
Why does the creation of our character depend so much on our society?
Are we destined to be a product of someone else’s standards and values?
How does the fear of death affect the way we live our lives?
What is the role of anxiety in our lives, and is it solely negative?
Many great thinkers over the past couple of centuries have dealt with these questions. I believe that anyone who is curious about what it means to be human in this complex and confusing world should do the same from time to time.
In this two-part essay series, I invite you to join me in doing just that.
Self-Esteem and Striving for Heroism
According to cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, self-esteem is when someone perceives themselves as a "person of value in a world of meaning." Becker thought that human beings need to believe that life has a meaning in order to survive. But according to him, for humans to really engage in life, we need to believe that we as individuals have some valuable or significant function in the context of that particular meaning that we believe in. So how do we achieve that?
Human society is set up in such a way that each of us is given a social role, and with that role comes a set of standards and even rules of behavior. The satisfaction of these standards and rules allows us to perceive ourselves as persons of value in a world of meaning.
In that type of society, you do not get self-esteem from within. You don’t get it from yourself - for yourself.
You get self-esteem by following the standards that are inherent to your social role within the "world of meaning" that you believe in, whether it’s based on a religious, political, or any other kind of ideology. Our self-esteem is obtained from outside of ourselves and is dependent on social requirements that are specific to our time and place. That’s at least how each of us starts off, being that we are social animals prone to conformity.
The primary function of self-esteem, according to Becker, is that it acts as a defense mechanism against the anxiety that awareness of death could otherwise produce. He believed that we cannot face the reality of our inevitable death without experiencing paralyzing anxiety.
In order to avoid facing this anxiety, we try to "deny death." Denial of death is achieved through "striving for heroism," which for Becker meant that we attach ourselves to something that will outlive us, thus giving us some sort of immortality.
"Society itself is a codified hero system, which means that society everywhere is a living myth of the significance of human life, a defiant creation of meaning. Every society thus is a "religion" whether it thinks so or not: Soviet "religion" and Maoist "religion" are as truly religious as are Scientific and Consumer "religion," no matter how much they may try to disguise themselves by omitting religious and spiritual ideas from their lives." (Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death)
There are some rare individuals, however, who engage in what Becker called personal or cosmic heroism, which is heroism of authenticity, as opposed to the cultural heroism of conformity described in the quote above.
But how do we decide to embark on the journey of personal heroism and start living authentically? Many thinkers believed that for a major shift in our attitude towards our lives and ourselves to occur, a personal crisis is needed.
(I've recommended Ernest Becker's "The Denial of Death" on my book recommendations list that you can download here for free.)
Identity Crisis and Making a Choice
At some point in their lives, everyone goes through what is called an "identity crisis," a term coined by developmental psychologist Erik Erikson. Erikson believed that when we are hit with an identity crisis, we get to make a choice.
One of our choices is to continue living the same way we've been living up to that point, which means measuring ourselves in terms of society’s expectations of us. This choice is understandable and common, but it also means giving up on having an authentic life.
And hardly any thinker talked about this issue as much as one of my favorites and most referenced ones, Soren Kierkegaard.
Kierkegaard dedicated much of his writing to warning us about the dangers of choosing this safer and easier path. That’s because he knew that, by choosing this path, you end up "losing yourself" in the mass of people with "no true self."
"What we call worldliness simply consists of such people who, if one may so express it, pawn themselves to the world. They use their abilities, amass wealth, carry out worldly enterprises, make prudent calculations, etc., and perhaps are mentioned in history, but they are not themselves. In a spiritual sense they have no self." (Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death)
The more time one spends "blending in with the crowd" and living life by someone else's standards, the further away they get from their true selves. Gradually, one loses a sense of being an individual and becomes content with being a number in the crowd, a cog in the machine.
"Surrounded by hordes of people, busy with all sorts of secular matters, more and more shrewd about the ways of the world – such a person forgets himself, forgets his name divinely understood, does not dare to believe in himself, finds it too risky to be himself, far easier and safer to be like the others, to become a copy, a number, part of the crowd." (Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death)
The other choice we have, Erikson and many other thinkers believed, is that of shaping our character and our life path by our conscious decisions. It is deciding what kind of individual we want to become based on our values, beliefs, and standards, creating our own authentic version of what a "person of value in a world of meaning" is.
"Giving style to one's character," Nietzsche said, "a great and rare art!"
Perhaps some, or even most, of your values and standards will end up overlapping with those of your society. But what makes a crucial difference is that you've chosen them.
By taking this path, you open yourself to the possibility of cosmic heroism.
But what makes this path so much harder and therefore less traveled? And how can such bizarre things as death and anxiety help us on this path? That's what we will be talking about in Part 2 of this series.
Thank you for reading.
P.S. The presale of my upcoming book, "The Art of Showing Up," is almost over. At the time of publishing this, there are around 10 hours left before the offer expires. If you buy during this presale, you get another ebook, "The Gold Pill: Timeless Ideas for a Life Worth Living," for free. If you are interested, click here.
I also wrote a free ebook for you, “The Lost Art of Reading.” You can download it here.
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