Ernest Becker - 1924-1974
Read This Article
This is a wonderful article that succinctly covers Becker’s ideas, TMT, and the state of the world:
https://newrepublic.com/article/199347/1-fear-death-wreaking-havoc-world
The Ernest Becker Foundation Guide
I've always been interested in what the EBF does. They are amazing at taking incredibly hard-to-understand, complicated things and putting them into words that make sense. Let's be honest: it can be hard to understand and remember these ideas. But this tutorial does something unique: it breaks everything down to its most basic parts.
What stands out to me the most is how they've made something that seems impossible to understand easy to understand. These aren't just ideas that people in academia talk about; they're real frameworks that can change how we think about and deal with the world.
I'm interested in what you think: Do you think it's worth it to think about these ideas? What is it about these notions that makes them worth paying attention to?
For reference
Ernest Becker Foundation. (2023). A communications toolkit for campaigners on death anxiety and societal change. The Ernest Becker Foundation.
About Becker's synthesis:
"Being aware of death makes people invest in our cultural worldviews, which help us feel like we have an important place in a meaningful world." "Feeling that we have contributed to something that will live on after us reduces the anxiety and discomfort that come with knowing that we will one day die" (Ernest Becker Foundation, 2023, p. 1).
About cultural buffers:
“Culture can give us a sense of immortality that helps us deal with our fear of death and lets us live our lives and be part of society. For individuals who adhere to religious worldviews, a sense of immortality may be perceived literally (afterlife, heaven, reincarnation, etc.), whereas for others, immortality is understood symbolically (leaving a legacy, career advancement, attaining fame or notoriety, creating something of value, procreation, etc.) (Ernest Becker Foundation, 2023, p. 1).
About the beginnings of TMT:
Three social psychologists—Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, and Sheldon Solomon—came up with Terror Management Theory (TMT) in 1986 to see if Becker's ideas about how people use culture to deal with existential terror were true (Ernest Becker Foundation, 2023, p. 1).
On the breakdown of worldviews:
“If our cultural buffers are working right, most of the time people should feel pretty safe mentally. But when these cultural buffers are endangered or completely disrupted... worldviews can break down, and that underlying fear starts to come to the surface" (Ernest Becker Foundation, 2023, p. 1).
About defensive responses:
People mainly seek self-esteem by becoming more entrenched in their worldviews, values, and ideas; more loyal to their own culture and in-group; and more antagonistic toward others (Ernest Becker Foundation, 2023, p. 2).
On reminders of death in advocacy:
"Challenges to someone's cultural worldview or 'immortality project' can provoke death anxiety, leading to avoidance or, worse, aggression towards the message and the messenger" (Ernest Becker Foundation, 2023, p. 2).
About persuasive messaging:
"Most advocates know how important it is to send clear, persuasive messages, but does your approach take into account the fear of death?" Decades of TMT research have shown us that when we create messages, we should think about how people react to death dread. This can help stop defensive behaviors (Ernest Becker Foundation, 2023, p. 3).
On framing for the group:
“Using language that reflects the worldview or core beliefs shared by your audience will make them feel like they are part of a ‘in-group.’ "This makes them feel more connected and less defensive" (Ernest Becker Foundation, 2023, p. 3).
“Lunch in the French Countryside,” 5” x 4” Black Glass Ambrotype, France 2009
Clarity on Direction for Doctoral Studies
As I move through this program, I’ll be posting here as part diary/journal and part research/reminders. I’m going to start at the beginning (first things first, in that order).
Despite existing research on death anxiety and Terror Management Theory, there remains a lack of understanding about how artists uniquely engage with mortality through their creative practice. Here lies my sweet spot: artists metabolize absurdity into elegiac beauty, creating work that doesn’t deny death but dwells in its presence.
While previous studies have examined the psychological strategies humans use to manage death anxiety, few have focused on the role of art-making as a direct and conscious confrontation with death (the main driver for me). The literature has largely prioritized quantitative measures of death anxiety and its behavioral outcomes, but less attention has been paid to qualitative, practice-based explorations of how mortality awareness shapes the creative process.
“I use mortality as a creative source, creating art that turns fear into connection and purpose.”
I want my work to address this gap by investigating how artists’ engagement with death anxiety can lead to existentially authentic art. Using a mixed-methods approach that combines autoethnography, interviews with artists, and analysis of creative works, this study will explore how artistic practice functions as a site for mortality confrontation and how such engagement reorients artistic purpose and output. It sounds daunting, I know, but it’s really just asking questions about how mortality affects creative people versus those who don’t identify as creative.
The research will contribute to existential psychology, art theory, and creative practice by offering an integrated theoretical and practice-based model for understanding how artists process death anxiety. The findings are expected to inform theories of death anxiety, models of creative practice, and arts-based approaches to existential therapy, ultimately supporting artists, educators, and mental health practitioners in fostering deeper, more meaningful engagement with the realities of death.
“The life-giving question guiding me now is: How might confronting mortality through creativity lead us into deeper, more authentic ways of being human?”
Vision Seed (short form)
Helping people directly confront mortality—not as a means to an end, but as a source of ingenuity, fortitude, and a closer bond—is my vision seed. I use historical wounds, grief, and death anxiety in my writing and art to demonstrate how facing our greatest fears can lead to purpose and service. My mission is to advance these discussions so that we can live more compassionately, reciprocally, and with greater presence.
Photo by Vlad Rebek, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 2025
Quinn Jacobson - Seeking Residency. I was climbing the rocks near The Chi Center (where we were staying), looking at the 600-year-old petroglyphs. This photograph was made by my good friend, Vlad Rebek. He is an upperclassman in the program and has a love for photography, like me.
My First Doctoral Retreat
“Here lies my sweet spot: artists metabolize absurdity into elegiac beauty, creating work that doesn’t deny death but dwells in its presence.”
I just spent six days in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for my first residency in the doctoral program in Visionary Practice and Regenerative Leadership (VPRL) at Southwestern College. The residency was titled Seeking, and that word couldn’t have been more fitting.
The time with peers and faculty was both enlightening and challenging. In many ways, it transported me back to my Goddard days, when I earned my M.F.A.I.A. degree. That experience was life-changing, and I chose Southwestern College because I sensed a similar depth in its pedagogy. These programs are rare. They carry an intimacy, a rigor, and a kind of searching that I haven’t found anywhere else. I believe these next three years will shape me just as profoundly.
“El Papacito,” the Chi Center dog. He was a little ball of love. He would come and hang out with my at meal times. A real little sweetheart.
That said, this first step wasn’t easy. While the environment felt familiar, it was also the first time I’ve stood in front of a group of thoughtful, intelligent, and deeply considerate people and presented my ideas about mortality, creativity, and meaning. It wasn’t smooth. I stumbled. I second-guessed myself. Too much time in my own head made it harder to bring my thoughts clearly into the room.
At moments, I felt like Howard Hughes crawling out of a cave—disheveled, blinking at the light—shouting ideas about death that weren’t really about death at all. They were about life, meaning, and what it means to create in the face of the void. But that’s the point, isn’t it? You can’t do this work alone. You need community to test ideas, to sharpen them, to remind you that what feels like incoherence might just be the rough beginning of something worth saying.
I didn’t do a perfect job, but that’s okay. Seeking isn’t about having answers. It’s about showing up, risking failure, and trusting the process. And that’s exactly what I plan to keep doing.
This has got a UFO and alien vibes all over it!
600-800-year-old little man in the sky! I ended up doing a little watercolor painting of this one.
A 600-800-year-old bird petroglyph—these things made me wonder about humans and their activities to be remembered.
A Cholla Cactus walking cane leaning on a large granite stone.
We did this exercise on fractals—Earthflow & Fractal Pattern Explorations and Scales of Action, Scales of Influence, a micro-to-macro experiential art project. I saw fractals everywhere after that—I do love the Golden Ratio and Fibonacci numbers.
Picacho Hills early August morning. Las Cruces, New Mexico 2025
The Explanatory Power of Becker's Ideas and TMT
On the first page of Ernest Becker’s book, The Birth and Death of Meaning (1962), he wrote, “This is an ambitious book. In these times there is hardly any point in writing just for the sake of writing: one has to want to do something really important. What I have tried to do here is to present in a brief, challenging, and readable way the most important things that the various disciplines have discovered about man, about what makes people act the way they do.”
Terror Management Theory (TMT), developed as an extension of Ernest Becker’s work, posits that the uniquely human awareness of mortality gives rise to profound existential anxiety. As Becker argued in The Denial of Death (1973), this awareness creates the potential for paralyzing terror that must be managed if life is to remain bearable. To buffer against this anxiety, individuals construct and maintain cultural worldviews that provide meaning, order, and the promise of personal significance. These worldviews not only orient individuals within a shared reality but also serve as symbolic defenses against death anxiety. Consequently, human motivation is fundamentally tied to sustaining the belief that life has purpose and that one’s existence has value. When these worldviews are challenged—or when mortality becomes salient—individuals typically respond with defensive strategies aimed at reestablishing confidence in their cultural frameworks and reaffirming their sense of worth.
This is where my work enters the conversation. If culture at large defends us against mortality, art can turn toward it. My work is centered on art that metabolizes death anxiety into meaning—not by escaping it, but by dwelling in its presence. Over the next three years, I will be creating both a dissertation and a body of work that explore how creativity can transform existential dread into something we can live with, and maybe even live more fully because of it.
“Ode to Van Gogh,” manipulated Polaroid. 1993. Part of the Visions in Mortality exhibition.
From Visions in Mortality to In the Shadow of Sun Mountain: Tracing a Life’s Work
In 1993, I put together a small exhibition called Visions in Mortality. At the time, I didn’t know Ernest Becker’s work, I hadn’t read The Worm at the Core (Terror Management Theory), and Ajit Varki and Danny Brower’s book Denial was still years away from being published. But even without the theory, I knew where my compass pointed. I wanted to make art about death anxiety and existential struggles.
Looking back now, those photographs feel like an instinctive first attempt to break through the evolutionary wall of denial. I didn’t have the language for it then, but what I was doing was confronting the thing most of us spend our lives avoiding. The work wasn’t about distraction or comfort—it was about holding mortality in front of myself and anyone willing to look.
That exhibition planted a seed. It revealed what would become the through-line of my entire practice: how do we live, create, and remain human in full awareness of our impermanence?
“Gone to Seed,” Whole Plate Photogenic Drawing on vellum paper (waxed). The work was created in 2022 as part of the project titled, “In the Shadow of Sun Mountain: The Psychology of Othering and the Origins of Evil.”
Three decades later, In the Shadow of Sun Mountain is the mature expression of that same impulse. Where Visions in Mortality was raw, direct, and almost primal, Sun Mountain is layered—woven through with Becker’s insights on cultural worldviews, TMT’s evidence of our defensive psychology, and Varki and Brower’s claim that denial itself had to evolve in order for us to function as conscious beings.
The difference is scope. Visions in Mortality was a solitary confrontation with death, denial, and culture. Sun Mountain is a confrontation with collective denial—the way cultures rewrite history, erase peoples, and commit violence (genocide) in the name of permanence. It’s about how our fear of death doesn’t just haunt us as individuals but shapes entire societies.
But the continuity matters more than the contrast. Both projects spring from the same recognition: that art is one of the few places where denial can falter, where we can face mortality directly without looking away. That has been my practice from the beginning, whether I had the theory to explain it or not.
Now, in my doctoral studies, I’m taking this inquiry a step further. I’m asking not only how artists confront mortality differently than others, but also what that confrontation makes possible—for art, for ethics, and for the way we live together. If Visions in Mortality was the initiation and Sun Mountain the culmination, this research is the extension. It’s an attempt to turn decades of practice into a framework that others—artists, scholars, anyone willing to face the void—can use to think differently about mortality, meaning, and art.
Visions in Mortality was the beginning. Sun Mountain is the continuation. The dissertation will be the next turn in the spiral—returning to the same question from a higher vantage: what does it mean to create, to love, to exist, knowing all along that the universe is indifferent and that everything vanishes?
A Conversation I've Had Many Times
Them: “Quinn, what are you talking about? I don’t think about death. I’m not afraid of it.”
You: That’s a bold claim. But let me ask—what do you think happens when you die?
Them: I don’t know. I guess nothing. You just stop existing.
You: And imagining that—your body gone, your projects unfinished, your name forgotten, your consciousness erased—doesn’t stir anything in you? No unease at all?
Them: Not really. I don’t think so.
You: That’s fascinating, because Becker would say that’s exactly how denial works. The fear doesn’t disappear—it sinks below awareness. And then culture steps in with buffers: religion, family, nation, career, personal projects, lifestyle, and even the idea that progress or legacy will carry you forward. You’re protected from having to feel the dread directly.
Them: Maybe. But I still don’t feel afraid.
You: And yet you live inside projects of meaning every day—your work, your relationships, the things you deeply care about, and your hopes for the future. Why do those matter if death doesn’t? Becker would say they matter because of death—because without them, the nothingness is unbearable. So I must question: does your confidence truly embody fearlessness, or is it the most potent form of denial—one so subtle that it remains invisible to you?
“Arapahoe Teepees, Eastern Plains, Colorado,” Whole Plate P.O.P. print from a wet collodion negative.
My Core Values
Scottish essayist Alexander Smith wrote, "It is our knowledge that we have to die that makes us human.”
My core values guide the way I live and create. I’m driven to seek truth, even when it’s uncomfortable. I want to live authentically—without masks, aligned with who I really am. I hold justice, mercy, and empathy close, because they rise from lived experience and connection with others. And I try to practice existential courage: facing mortality and absurdity without turning away.
For me, everything starts with mortality. It’s the one truth we all share, yet most of us spend our lives trying not to think about it. My work—whether it’s photography, painting, or writing—circles back to that truth. I want to face it, learn from it, and make something honest out of it.
I believe in telling the truth of lived experience, even when it’s uncomfortable. Especially then. Those moments where we’d rather turn away are often the ones that shape us the most.
Creative integrity is everything to me. I have no interest in chasing trends or borrowing someone else’s voice. The work has to come from my own place in the world—my own questions, my own struggles, and my own search for meaning.
I think artists have a responsibility to remember. To hold on to the stories, the histories, and the human realities that others might prefer to forget. That means confronting the psychology of othering and refusing to let erasure win.
I’ve always valued depth over distraction. I want my work to stick with people—not just be glanced at and forgotten, but to stay with them and maybe even shift something inside.
Mortality is the one thing we all have in common. Facing it honestly can open us up—make us more compassionate, more awake, and maybe more fully human.
And then there’s courage. Not the loud kind, but the quiet willingness to walk into the places most people avoid—genocide sites, philosophical voids, the edges of my own life—and come back with something worth sharing.
“Hanging Fisherman,” Whole Plate Black Glass Ambrotype—Hangzhou, China, 2014 (part of a diptych).
Mortality as the Artist’s Compass
I have come to believe that authenticity in art is not only about emotional honesty. That is part of it, of course. But for me, it is about something deeper: truth to your own existential position.
Most of us spend a lifetime borrowing meaning from somewhere else, from culture, religion, politics, or trends. We take on beliefs about life and death that make things easier to bear, whether or not they feel real to us. And then, if we are lucky or unlucky enough, something cracks those beliefs open. A death. A diagnosis. A moment when the denial stops working.
When that happens, you are left staring at your own finite reflection. The illusions peel away. The question becomes: What do I actually believe about my time here?
For an artist, that is the turning point. Once you have wrestled with your own mortality, the work changes. It stops being about what will sell or what will get likes. It stops being about fitting into someone else’s “hero system.” The work starts coming from a place that is aligned with how you actually see the world, its fragility, its cruelty, its beauty, its brevity.
That is when the art gets dangerous. Vulnerable. Alive. People can feel it, even if they cannot explain why.
Confronting death does not just strip away the noise. It reorients the compass. The art you make from that place carries the weight of your own reckoning. It is not about making peace with death. It is about making something true in its shadow.
What This Looks Like in Practice
I have seen this shift in my own work. When I started photographing massacre sites for Ghost Dance, it was not a project I chose because it was marketable. In fact, I knew it would make some people uncomfortable. I chose it because those places carried the weight of lives ended, stories erased, and the uncomfortable truth that we are standing on the bones of history. Making that work forced me to sit with my own mortality and the fact that history is a mirror, not just a record.
You see the same thing in other artists who have wrestled with death. Käthe Kollwitz lost her son in the First World War, and her work after that loss is stripped of any pretension, just raw, unfiltered grief and solidarity with those crushed by violence. There is Egon Schiele, painting feverishly as the Spanish flu closed in on him, his portraits vibrating with the urgency of someone who knows the clock is almost out of time. Or someone like David Wojnarowicz, turning his rage at the AIDS epidemic into work that was both deeply personal and politically explosive.
In each case, the confrontation with mortality burned away the excess. What was left was not pretty or safe. It was a direct transmission of how they saw the world in that moment.
That is the authenticity I am talking about. Not the buzzword. Not the marketing gimmick. The kind that comes when you have looked death in the eye and decided to make something anyway.
Why This Matters Beyond Art
This is the heartbeat of my current research. In my doctoral work, I am exploring how artists confront death anxiety differently than non-artists and what that difference reveals about the human search for meaning. Drawing on thinkers like Ernest Becker and Otto Rank, I am looking at how creative engagement with mortality does not just change the work. It changes the maker.
When an artist faces death head-on, it interrupts the psychological strategies we all use to soften the fact of our finitude. Those strategies, denial, distraction, and absorption in borrowed belief systems, are comfortable, but they keep us from living in alignment with our own worldview. Art that emerges from this confrontation is not only more personal. It is existentially authentic.
I believe this authenticity matters because it models a way of living. It shows that even in the shadow of death, and maybe especially there, it is possible to create something that is alive with meaning, stripped of illusion, and true to the person who made it.
Dissertation Adaptation
This research investigates how artists confront death anxiety differently than non-artists and the implications of this difference for understanding the human search for meaning. Building on the work of Ernest Becker, Otto Rank, and Terror Management Theory, I propose that creative engagement with mortality disrupts the culturally mediated denial systems that typically buffer individuals from the anxiety of finitude. Such engagement compels the artist to interrogate and often discard “borrowed” systems of meaning in favor of a self-authored existential position. When the resulting creative work emerges from this clarified stance, it attains what I define as existential authenticity: a coherence between the artist’s worldview and their creative expression. This authenticity is not merely aesthetic or emotional; it is the product of alignment between the maker’s lived confrontation with mortality and the work they bring into the world. In this way, the artistic process becomes both a site of meaning-making and a lived model for confronting, rather than evading, the inevitability of death.