“The more neurotic and anxious you are, the more preoccupied you’ll be with death and unable to focus on meaningful life changes,” says Laura Blackie, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Nottingham. Regardless of whether society as a whole takes a nasty or nice turn, how we would react on an individual level to knowledge about our death would vary depending on personality and the specifics of the big event. “Knowing about the scarcity of life may increase the perception of life’s value and develop the sense that ‘we’re all in the same boat’, promoting tolerance and compassion and minimising defensive responses.” This would especially be true “if we promote strategies that help us to accept death as part of life and integrate this knowledge into our daily choices and behavior,” says Eva Jonas, a psychology professor at the University of Salzburg. Given these findings, learning our death date may lead us to focus more on life goals and social bonds rather than responding with knee-jerk insularity. They are also more open to reflecting on the roles of both positive and negative events in shaping their lives. In that case, people become more altruistic – willing, for example, to donate blood regardless of whether there is a high societal need for it. Researchers looking into a style of thinking called “death reflection” also have found that asking people to think not just about death in a general, abstract way, but to think about exactly how they will die and what impact their death will have on their families, elicits very different reactions. In the 1980s, psychologists became interested in how we deal with the potentially overwhelming anxiety and dread that come with the realisation that we are nothing more than “breathing, defecating, self-conscious pieces of meat that can die at any time”, as Sheldon Solomon, a psychology professor at New York’s Skidmore College, puts it. The macabre fate of ‘beating heart corpses’įirst, let’s establish what we know about how death shapes behaviour in the real world.Facebook is a growing and unstoppable digital graveyard.The woman who forced us to look death in the face.What would happen, though, if the ambiguity surrounding our own demise were taken away? What if we all suddenly were told the exact date and means of our deaths? While this is, of course, impossible, careful consideration of this hypothetical scenario can shed light on our motivations as individuals and societies – and hint at how to best spend our limited time on this Earth. “We cope by focusing on the things more directly in front of us.” “Most of the time, we go through our days unaware, not thinking of our mortality,” says Chris Feudtner, a pediatrician and ethicist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania. According to some psychologists, this uncomfortable truth constantly lurks in the back of our minds and ultimately drives everything we do, from choosing to attend church, eat vegetables and go to the gym to motivating us to have children, write books and create companies.įor healthy people, death usually lurks in the back of our minds, exerting its influence on a subconscious level. You and everyone you’ve ever known will someday die.
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