Accepting mortality can make life more meaningful and compassionate
Evidence
Come to terms with death. Really grasp that being mortal, while terrifying, can also make our lives sublime by infusing us with courage, compassion, and concern for future generations. Seek enduring significance through your own combination of meanings and values, social connections, spirituality, personal accomplishments, identifications with nature, and momentary experiences of transcendence. — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 814
Categorization
- APHORISMS: A genuine piece of life-advice: grasping mortality can transform terror into courage, compassion, and concern for future generations.
- XREF: connects to: Interiorizing death makes it a personal, responsible feature of a unique life; Vital-seeming healthy people resemble the walking dead; Authentic existence requires accepting that we will die — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 292 (+1 more)
Related
- Accepting mortality reduces destructive unconscious death fears (similarity 0.90)
- Interiorizing death makes it a personal, responsible feature of a unique life (similarity 0.86)
- People are generally oblivious to death yet it shapes their experience (similarity 0.85)
- Death’s most powerful influence operates unseen in normal life (similarity 0.84)
- Vital-seeming healthy people resemble the walking dead (similarity 0.84)
- Knowing how death awareness drives defenses enables more self-determined choices (similarity 0.84)
- Prolonged death contemplation keeps mortality thoughts conscious and suppresses defensive reactions (similarity 0.82)
- Mortality reminders uniquely trigger worldview defense unlike other threats (similarity 0.80)
- No account of human behavior is complete without the awareness of death (similarity 0.79)
- Death-awareness drives humans to cling to cultural worldviews and self-esteem (similarity 0.79)
- Death awareness would have been lethal without simultaneous cultural adaptations to deny it (similarity 0.79)
- Authentic existence requires accepting that we will die (similarity 0.79)
- Cultural worldviews structure conscious experience to mask death’s inevitability (similarity 0.78)
- Attitudes toward death rest on a more fundamental project of living (similarity 0.78)
- Fear of death ultimately reduces to thwarted biological survival instinct. (similarity 0.78)