This is Part 2 of the essay series on How Death and Anxiety Help Us Live Authentically. If you haven’t already, read Part 1 here.
(The following is a short recap of Part 1. If you don’t need it, skip to “Difficulties of an Authentic Life”)
Last week, we set the stage by talking about how humans get self-esteem from outside of themselves. According to Ernest Becker, we receive self-esteem by following the standards that are inherent to our social role within the "world of meaning" that we believe in. The role of self-esteem, Becker argued, is that of a defense mechanism against the anxiety that awareness of death otherwise produces in us. This leads to most people living lives of following an ideology that gives them a role in a "world of meaning," which amounts to an inauthentic life.
However, at some point in our lives, we all face an identity crisis. We are faced with a choice. We can continue living the same way we've been living up to that point, which means living our lives according to society’s expectations of us.
The second choice is that of creating ourselves and our lives. 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.
Even though choosing to live an authentic life seems like a superior and ultimately more rewarding path, it is a path chosen by few. But why? That’s what we’ll be talking about today.
Difficulties of an authentic life
Choosing to live an authentic life is a harder path, paved with obstacles and solitude.
Nonconformist, unique individuals were always feared by the masses. With their authentic way of life, they trigger doubt in the minds of the crowd regarding the actual significance and validity of their social roles.
Remember how we talked about how most people get their self-esteem from being "a person of value" in our ideological "world of meaning"? Well, imagine when that type of person sees someone trying to be a person of value by their own standards and in their own world of meaning. To a person who’s been living an inauthentic life, the authentic person challenges the significance of their whole life.
It is no wonder then that the masses actively discourage and suppress the cultivation of character and try to stifle any attempt at uniqueness, considering that they are trying to preserve the value and significance of their very existence.
This is why those who decide to embark on the path of an authentic life are destined to be met with discouragement, ignorance, ridicule, rejection and at times even isolation from the society.
Being unique is difficult. In fact, according to Nietzsche, being unique is so difficult that it is not fear, but laziness that prevents so many of us from living authentically. He argues that our greatest fear is actually the fear of how much effort is required to persist in being a unique individual.
"A traveler who had seen many countries, peoples and several of the earth's continents was asked what attribute he had found in men everywhere. He said: "They have a propensity for laziness." To others, it seems that he should have said: "They are all fearful. They hide themselves behind customs and opinions." In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that there will be no second chance for his oneness to coalesce from the strangely variegated assortment that he is: he knows it but hides it like a bad conscience—why? From fear of his neighbor, who demands conformity and cloaks himself with it. But what is it that forces the individual to fear his neighbor, to think and act like a member of a herd, and to have no joy in himself? Modesty, perhaps, in a few rare cases. For the majority it is idleness, inertia, in short that propensity for laziness of which the traveler spoke. He is right: men are even lazier than they are fearful, and fear most of all the burdensome nuisance of absolute honesty and nakedness." (Friedrich Nietzsche – Untimely Meditations)
(I dedicated a whole essay to analyzing just this quote, which I consider to be Nietzsche’s most underrated idea. You can check it out here.)
The Value of Death and Anxiety
If there are so many different forces working against us living an authentic life, and if we are too lazy to keep resisting those forces, is there anything that might help us choose the path of an authentic life?
Martin Heidegger recognized two unexpected friends we have in this situation.
Heidegger wrote about the human propensity to avoid being authentic individuals. Like Kierkegaard before him and Becker after him, Heidegger believed that the majority of people escape their awareness of death by leading inauthentic, conformist lives. According to him, the default state of humans is conformity.
In order for us not to be shaped and limited by others, Heidegger believed we need to change our attitude towards death. He advised that we develop "resoluteness toward death." It means that we recognize the importance of death in our lives as well as the ever-present possibility that our life can end at any given moment. Living with this attitude Heidegger called "being-towards-death". Although this "being-towards-death" produces anxiety, it is the kind of anxiety that is needed to shake us out of conformity.
When faced with the awareness of our mortality, we see most of the societal roles, standards and expectations for what they really are, and that’s empty constructions. The death-anxiety that we fear so much individualizes us, and we are finally free to become our unique, authentic selves.
"Ironically, the one factor that can set an individual reliably on the path to authentic living is a full acknowledgment of his or her personal death. According to Heidegger, full realization that "I am going to die. Not anyone else, but I, alone, as an individual" arouses in individuals a primordial sense of certainty that shocks them into identifying themselves as an individual apart from their culture. It is as though an individual’s unique personal existence stands out most sharply when contrasted with the individual’s unique personal nonexistence." (Handbook of Experimental Existential Psychology)
If I must die, then I must live.
And the only way I truly live is if I live my own life and not a pre-scripted story given to me by others.
Thank you for reading.
If you are interested in my book recommendations list, you can download it here for free.
You can also check my ebooks, “The Lost Art of Reading,” and “The Gold Pill.”
If you like my work and get some value from it, there is zero-cost support in the form of subscribing, liking this post, commenting if you have any thoughts on it, and of course sharing this with anyone who would find it interesting.
Or you can consider becoming a paid supporter of Existential Espresso for 5$ per month. By doing this you would be helping me to keep investing time into researching and writing all the content on the daily basis.
What you get by becoming a paid supporter is access to the locked essays (such as “Why Having a Price on My Head Didn’t Upset Me”or “Why Living With a Bulletproof Vest is The Best Thing to Ever Happen to Me”), as well as an opportunity to recommend topics for future essays.
However, even taking the time out of your day to read what I have to share with you means more to me than you can imagine. Thank you.
Really love this concept (& whole piece)!
Definitely resonates with me 🔥