Sheldon Solomon, a professor of psychology at Skidmore College, has spent his professional life studying humans’ fear of death and the wide ranging implications it has on how we live. He and his colleagues detail this idea, Terror Management Theory, and their countless studies about TMT in their book, The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life. In this episode, Sheldon explains how the fear of death governs our society and also shares his journey of personal reckoning with his cosmic insignificance. He also has some really accessible recommendations for starting to make peace with your own death.
You can learn more about Sheldon’s work and find his book here:
Transcript:
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Hi. I'm Sarah Cavanaugh, and this is Peaceful Exit. Every episode we explore death, dying, and grief through stories by authors familiar with the topic. Writers are our translators. They take what is inexpressible, impossible to explain, and they translate it into words on a page.
Today I'm talking with Sheldon Solomon, an American social psychologist and professor at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. Sheldon, along with his colleagues, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski, developed and spent decades testing terror management theory. They believe that humans' fear of our own inevitable death drives most of our human behavior and has wide-ranging impacts on our individual lives and at every level of society. Their book, the Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life, came out in 2015. It's helped shape the conversation about death in a very meaningful way. Please note that this episode does mention suicide and may be upsetting to some listeners.
Hey, there.
Sheldon Solomon:
Hello.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Oh, it's great to meet you.
Sheldon Solomon:
Hey, you too.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
I need to know the name of the dog behind you that's sacked out.
Sheldon Solomon:
Yeah, the dog's name is Scruffy. That was his name at the rescue.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Oh.
Sheldon Solomon:
Yeah, he's a good guy. So during the pandemic, he got used to being with me, and now he's kind of nervous, so I just bring him in.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
I'd like to read a little passage from your book ...
Sheldon Solomon:
Sure.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
... because what impressed me so much in this is it's asking the question that the reader might ask and you're asking it of yourselves, which I really appreciate. If life is so perilous and people are perpetually pelted with an onslaught of reminders of potentially lethal hazards, shouldn't they be constantly cowering in closets or frantically groping for supersized sedatives? Is death really the worm at the core of the human condition, or is it just an aberrant fixation of sullen artists, philosophers, and psychologists like the three of us?
Sheldon Solomon:
Yeah, both.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Love the language you use too and all the alliteration in there. If you're listening, it's poetry. I understand that you've spent the better part of your career studying this, but it's not just an academic pursuit for you.
Sheldon Solomon:
Yes. My academic pursuit is in complete alignment with my personal concerns, although it took me a while to realize this. My tale is that I've been extraordinarily disinclined to die since the day that I realized it was inevitable. I was 8 years old, and it was the day that my grandmother died. I love my grandmother. And it was a sad day, but I got to thinking, as I was sitting there, about the implications of what had happened. And the first thing I realized was that, wow, that means my mom is going to get older, and someday I will lose her.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Yeah.
Sheldon Solomon:
As an 8-year-old, I was like, wow, where will I get spaghetti and chocolate pudding, my basic food groups? And then I collected stamps at the time. And I was looking at my stamp collection. And I had all these old stamps of American presidents, Thomas Jefferson, Adams, and Washington and so on, and I'm like, oh, no, wait a minute, none of those presidents are here.
Well, anyway, then two plus two equaled four, and I had my first full-blown existential crisis. I was like, wow, it is rather inevitable that there will come a moment, where I will be summarily obliterated. And I really did have one of those spine-tingling, hair-raising moments that I managed to bury in the back of my psychological landscape for a bit.
And then fast-forward about 20 years later, I was a young professor at Skidmore College, and in my first week at Skidmore, I accidentally bumped into books by Ernest Becker, who at the time was a recently deceased cultural anthropologist that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973, The Denial of Death. Becker, in the first paragraph of the book, says that humans are unique in our awareness of the inevitability of death, as well as our ardent disinclination to accept that basic reality of the human condition, and that whether we like it or not, whether we're aware of it or not, everything that we do, everything that we think, everything that we want is in some way a reflection of our disinclination to die.
Personally, it kind of hurled me into just my next existential crisis, Becker's claims that our awareness of death gives rise to potentially paralyzing existential terror that we, as human beings, manage by embracing what he called cultural worldviews, humanly constructed beliefs about reality that we share with other people in our group that minimizes death anxiety by giving us each a sense that life has meaning and that we have value. And moreover, what Becker argued is that quite unconsciously, for the most part, that's our basic motivation every day that allows us to stand up in the morning, the belief that we live in a world of meaning and one that we also are able to make significant contributions towards.
Well, anyway, I'm reading all of that, and I'm saying to myself, wow, this sounds like me. And so I ended up a few years, I think in my first five years or so at Skidmore, I took two years off, and I worked in a variety of well, blue collar trades. I grew up working in restaurants, and I did some of that. I did construction work, and I wandered around the United States.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Wait. What were you trying to figure out during that leave of absence?
Sheldon Solomon:
Yeah. All right. I was trying to figure out just a few simple questions. Who am I?
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Yeah.
Sheldon Solomon:
Why am I here? Am I a culturally constructed meat puppet, tranquilizing myself with the trivial, merely to reduce death anxiety? Or are the things that I do from day to day of genuine value?
Sarah Cavanaugh:
What is your death story, your conversations? Clearly, when you were 8, you said you buried it for a while, then it came back up and you took this leave of absence. Walk me through how it became your profession and you began having conversations about death all the time.
Sheldon Solomon:
I came back from my leaves of absence. And by that time, Tom and Jeff and I had started doing experiments. A lot of our colleagues, they just didn't like Becker's ideas. They said, hey, this is speculative nonsense. How could you ever prove that our concerns about death have a pervasive effect on attitudes and behavior?
So we started doing research under the rubric of what's now called terror management theory. And we developed some very simple paradigms, including one where we just said, all right, let's remind some people that they're going to die. And we'll remind other people of something negative but not fatal, like you're in a car accident and they had to amputate a leg or something like that. And then we just said, well, if Becker's right, if our beliefs about reality serve to minimize death anxiety, well, when death is on your mind, you should, therefore, again, whether you're aware of it or not, engage in defensive responses to bolster confidence in your beliefs as well as to fortify self-esteem.
All right. So we remind people that they're going to die in the lab by just saying, hey, write down your thoughts and feelings about dying. Sometimes we're more clever. We stop people outside either in front of a funeral parlor or 100 meters to either side. And here we're thinking that if you're standing in front of a funeral parlor, death could be on your mind even though you don't know it. Or back in the lab, we have people read stuff on a computer screen. And while they're doing that, we flash the word death.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
The subliminal messages.
Sheldon Solomon:
Yeah, 28 milliseconds, so fast that you don't even know that death is on your mind. Well, anyway, when we do that, the effects are quite surprising. So when judges are reminded that they're going to die, they're like 10 times more punitive towards moral transgressors. When Christians are reminded that they're going to die, they love Christians more and they hate Jewish people. That has nothing to do with Christianity. In Israel, Jewish people, reminded that they're going to die, they love Jewish people and they hate Christians. When death is on your mind, you're more likely to vote for a populist charismatic leader, you're more likely to be profoundly interested in having more money and stuff, you're more likely, if you smoke, to smoke, if you drink to drink.
And so the point is that there's now 40 years of research in more than 1000 published studies showing that malignant manifestations of death anxiety really bring out the worst in us.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Yeah.
Sheldon Solomon:
And that's quite unfortunate. So I think that my own kind of existential crisis was useful in terms of nudging me in a particular career direction. Yeah. At the same time, looking back, I also think it had the effect of turning my concerns about death into an intellectual exercise and thus sparing me actually having to do anything.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
To do it yourself. Yeah. Right. So what do we do? How do we start accepting our own inevitable demise and make peace with that?
Sheldon Solomon:
I think that we're in an extraordinarily death-denying culture. Moreover, we're surrounded by intimations of mortality. So every day it's ...
Sarah Cavanaugh:
You get all these messages about death.
Sheldon Solomon:
That's it. If it's not the pandemic ...
Sarah Cavanaugh:
And we can't talk about it.
Sheldon Solomon:
There you go. So there you go. So basically, our head is a raging bouillabaisse of non-conscious death anxiety that we know experimentally magnifies all of our worst instincts.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Yes.
Sheldon Solomon:
So it's an awkward moment because we're a death-denying culture saturated with death everywhere.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Yes.
Sheldon Solomon:
And so how are we going to break out of this kind of perseverating cycle of increasing agitation and defensive reactions? To finitude, well, I think it's enterprises like this, what you're trying to do, I see as of just paramount importance.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Thank you so much for that.
Sheldon Solomon:
I learned from a great clinician, David Holmes, and people at the University of Kansas in the 1970s. And he would say people would be like, oh, I'm super depressed. I need to talk. And he'd be like, I'll talk to you next week. I need you to go out and take a walk. And his point, and he was way ahead of his time, he's like, look, when you're walking, first of all, you're embodied. You're not a passive talking head spewing abstractions. And they call it embodied wisdom these days or embodied cognition. We're just catching up to ancient wisdom.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Go for a walk in the woods.
Sheldon Solomon:
There you go. Walk in the woods. So E. O. Wilson, being out in nature, extraordinarily palliative, being in motion and just having our focus on what's around us rather than what's inside of us. And Ernest Becker writes about being heroic. And my parents used to say, being heroic is making the best with the circumstances that you entered the world in.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Yeah. Yeah.
Sheldon Solomon:
And moreover, that it's not for us to say whether or not we have done something world-changing or transformative. I know I'm not going to be an Einstein or a Buddha or a Mother Teresa.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
I think you changed the conversation, and that's a very important contribution.
Sheldon Solomon:
Well, no, thank you, but I also think for me, it's important because a lot of people are like, ooh, I haven't done anything. I'm never going to do anything. And I'm like, stop saying that, in part, because you don't know.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
You never know your legacy.
Sheldon Solomon:
You don't know your legacy so how do you know that you aren't walking outside and you just looked up and saw somebody. You don't know him, you'll never see him again, but we just kind of nodded at each other, one of those momentary connections with a fellow human. Well, how do I know that that person wasn't about to go to the Golden Gate Bridge and jump off and they didn't. And I may die and not know that that's the next Buddha/Obama/Mary Poppins. And that's why I'm cautiously optimistic that the effusively mindful stance towards life that we've been kind of, I think, trying to depict, I see that the most virtuous stance towards life, even if it's not quite clear how that's going to be concretely manifested.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
So since the book has been written, have you done the personal work?
Sheldon Solomon:
Yeah. How about I've started.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Okay. All right.
Sheldon Solomon:
So for example, one thing that Eric Erickson writes about is people like Johnny Appleseed that walk around planting fruit trees, this is not like putting your name on a building to be remembered specifically. Here's somebody doing something, looking forward for the benefit of the next generation. And I find that to be an immensely interesting way to assuage death anxiety by just literally doing something for the future, knowing that I won't be part of it.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Are you familiar with the poet William Merwin?
Sheldon Solomon:
Oh, of course, one of my favorites.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
I was one of the founding board members of the Merwin Conservancy, and he was a dear friend of mine, and he has a quote, "On the last day of the world, I would want to plant a tree."
Sheldon Solomon:
Yes.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
And I think that speaks to what you're saying.
Sheldon Solomon:
That's quite wonderful.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Yeah.
Sheldon Solomon:
And then I've been really preoccupied with both what I've learned from Eastern philosophy as well as what I see now coming out of psychology. And they're almost completely overlapping, just the idea of awe and gratitude and humility being demonstrably effective for minimizing death anxiety. And this is where I find myself more interested in being, as a person, kind of in a proverbial nutshell. Becker, his work relies heavily on Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard said, "If you're smart enough to know that you're here, that's dreadful." But it's also awesome to be alive and to know.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
It's awesome.
Sheldon Solomon:
It's awesome.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Yeah.
Sheldon Solomon:
And we need to not lose track of that.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
So are you practicing gratitude in any way?
Sheldon Solomon:
I'm trying to.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Personally?
Sheldon Solomon:
Yeah. So I'm trying to wake up every day and be awed at the prospect of simply being here because awe leads to humility.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Right.
Sheldon Solomon:
Humility is just appreciating our radically inconsequential size in the context of the universe. In other words, I am a respiring speck of carbon-based dust, put here in a time and place not of my choosing for a really tiny amount of time before I am summarily obliterated in perpetuity. Now, that may sound horrific, but that can also be tremendously uplifting because I like how Otto Rank, one of Freud's boys, put it. He said, "When we're conscious, that makes us the temporal representatives of the cosmic primal force." Now, originally I'm like, dude, you had too many hallucinogens.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Yeah. Time out.
Sheldon Solomon:
Time out.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Yeah.
Sheldon Solomon:
Yeah. But then you read more, and he's like, okay, wait a minute, cosmic primal force, well, we're all directly descended from the first form of life. In other words, nobody disagrees that at some point there was the first thing that was alive. Well, we're related to that. We are related to everything that has ever been alive, everything that is alive, and everything that will ever be alive when we're no longer here. And it is that cosmic connection with all that is that can rather counterintuitively make humility in the context of cosmic insignificance. So positively uplifting. Because once I can see myself in that context, then for the most part, you should be effusively grateful every day ...
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Every day.
Sheldon Solomon:
... that we sit up. If you have a face full of fresh air, and if, like us, in the first world, if we slept in a bed last night, if we had breakfast this morning, then we need to be extraordinarily grateful. And this is what, I think, makes it hard for some folks because they'll be like, well, I never think about death, therefore, I mustn't be afraid of it. And this is not to argue with folks as much as to respectfully submit that people who insist that they are totally unafraid of death are often the ones that are most frightened of it. We have to make a distinction.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Right. The denial of death in this culture is pervasive. And I'm very curious about how we overcome and talk about death.
Sheldon Solomon:
Yes. But I think that honestly, the superordinate reason why, right now, America is a Petri dish of psychopathology is that we are the ultimate death-denying culture. The average person in the United States has never seen a dead person.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Right. Right.
Sheldon Solomon:
We spend more on cosmetics ...
Sarah Cavanaugh:
That's right.
Sheldon Solomon:
... to make us look younger, than we do on education, which is rather scary. We are so segregated intergenerationally that many of us do not intersect with the folks that are elderly. And I think that also contributes to massive and pervasive death denial.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
So what does a peaceful exit mean to you?
Sheldon Solomon:
I think it means, for the most part, having a comfortable relationship with the reality of the human condition. Martin Heidegger said that coming to terms with death is critical, but for most of us, we don't get there. So if you say, hey, you're going to die someday, people are like, yeah, okay, I'm going to die. But then they're like, yeah, I'm going to die. But always in the back of my head is, I'm going to die someday. Heidegger's point is, you're just kicking the temporal can down the road because I'm going to die someday, true. But a comet could come through the window of my office and obliterate me before I finish this sentence. We can go out today and get hit by a car or smote by the virus. So coming to terms with death, it is the humble awareness that my life can be summarily and permanently curtailed at any moment.
And as the philosopher Montaigne said in the 1500s, well, when you get to the point where that is always okay, that's the peaceful exit. And for me, I go with the epicurean view, and that's that the universe has countless atoms and they were here before I was born. And when I'm no longer here, those atoms will then go dancing back in the cosmos. And my version of a peaceful exit would be to, in some way, shape, or form, happily be able to, at that moment, say to myself, go with God, and just kind of be scattered throughout the universe.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Wonderful. Thank you. Thank you so much for your time today.
Sheldon Solomon:
No, thank you. You've made my day.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Thank you for listening to Peaceful Exit. You can learn more about this podcast and my online course at my website, peacefulexit.net. If you enjoyed this episode, please let us know. You can rate and review this show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. This episode was produced by Larj Media. You can find them at L-A-R-Jmedia.com. Special thanks to Ricardo Russell for the original music throughout this podcast. More of his music can be found on Bandcamp. As always, thanks for listening. I'm Sarah Cavanaugh, and this is Peaceful Exit.