Holding Pattern

I made Holding Pattern without a clear image in mind. What I had was pressure. The sense that something was circling without resolution, asking to be held rather than explained. The painting emerged through accumulation and restraint. Layers were added, scraped back, and redirected. Each decision responded less to intention than to the condition the surface was already carrying. I wasn’t trying to resolve the image. I was trying to stay with it.

Materially, the surface itself is ruptured; cracked, weathered, and refusing integrity. The paint records its own breakdown. This isn't a representation of rupture; it's rupture as material fact. The painting embodies what it's examining by subjecting itself to the same forces of deterioration it's addressing conceptually. The medium becomes inseparable from the inquiry.

As arts-based research methodology, this is knowledge production through making rather than through language. I’m not illustrating a thesis about reproduction-as-death-denial that you arrived at discursively. I’m using paint, surface, gesture, and material breakdown to think through something that can't be fully accessed through writing alone.

The painting knows things my writing can't get to. It enacts the gravitational pull of the drive, the suffocation of the holding pattern, the way ideology fragments bodies even as it organizes them. The counterclockwise inward spiral isn't a metaphor I chose to represent an idea, it's a formal discovery that emerged through material engagement, and it carries meaning that exceeds paraphrase.

Arts-based research treats the artwork as primary data and the making process as an investigative method. The decisions I made; impasto that builds up and cracks, a spiral that compresses rather than expands, colors that register as bodily rather than symbolic, these aren't aesthetic choices decorating research findings. They are the research. The painting generates understanding about death anxiety, compulsion, and cultural reproduction (egg) that exists in formal and material relationships rather than in arguments.

The rupture also functions methodologically as refusal of traditional research's demand for coherence and resolution. Academic writing wants to arrive somewhere, to synthesize, to offer frameworks. The painting refuses. It stays with fragmentation, with irresolution, with the holding pattern itself. That refusal is epistemological; it insists that some truths about mortality and compulsion can only be approached through sustained engagement with what won't cohere.

What I’m doing is using the body's engagement with materials, the physical acts of mixing, applying, scraping, building, and watching paint crack, as a way to metabolize cultural and psychological forces that are otherwise difficult to grasp. The painting becomes a site where those forces can be witnessed and worked through without being explained away.

The Sacred Didn’t Vanish - It Migrated

Any system that becomes the sole container for existential meaning will behave like a religion, including its pathologies.

That’s not a moral judgment. It’s a psychological observation.

We tend to talk about religion as something people either believe in or reject. But from an existential perspective, that framing misses what religion actually does. Religion isn’t primarily a set of supernatural claims. It’s a symbolic system that helps human beings orient themselves inside chaos. It answers questions we cannot avoid but cannot solve: Why am I here? What matters? How should I live? What do I do with suffering? What happens when I die?

From a Beckerian and Terror Management Theory perspective, those questions are not optional. They emerge the moment a creature becomes aware of its own impermanence. Once that awareness arrives, some form of meaning structure is required just to keep life psychologically livable. The mind does not ask first whether a worldview is true. It asks whether it works.

This is why the story we often tell about secularization is misleading. People haven’t outgrown religion in any deep psychological sense. What they’ve lost trust in are specific institutions. The need for meaning, belonging, ritual, and symbolic continuity hasn’t disappeared. It’s migrated.

That migration explains why so many people, particularly millennials and Gen Z, don’t experience cognitive dissonance when they abandon Christianity but embrace astrology, Tarot, wellness spirituality, social justice activism, or even technology as a source of ultimate meaning. What’s changing isn’t the need itself. It’s the container.

Institutional Christianity, for many, no longer functions as a reliable anxiety buffer. Its moral authority feels compromised. Its hierarchies often feel rigid rather than containing. Its narratives are frequently experienced as entangled with shame, coercion, exclusion, or political capture. Even when the metaphysical ideas remain compelling, the psychological cost of belonging can feel too high.

When a worldview stops regulating death anxiety at an acceptable price, it loses its grip. At that point, coherence becomes secondary. Survival takes over.

Astrology and Tarot step into that vacuum not because they are intellectually stronger systems, but because they are existentially lighter ones. They offer orientation without submission. Ritual without hierarchy. Meaning without moral surveillance. They allow uncertainty to remain open rather than demanding closure. Most importantly, they do not force a direct confrontation with mortality, judgment, or finality.

These systems operate symbolically rather than doctrinally. They don’t insist on being true in an ontological sense. They ask to be useful. A horoscope, a card pull, a full moon ritual, or a crystal doesn’t claim to explain the universe. It offers a way to relate to uncertainty without being overwhelmed by it. From a psychological standpoint, that matters more than logical consistency.

What looks like contradiction from the outside is actually an efficient substitution. The ritual structure remains. The narrative structure remains. The identity structure remains. Only the metaphysical scaffolding has softened.

The same pattern shows up elsewhere.

In transhumanist culture, technology takes on functions once reserved for God. It promises guidance, omniscience, salvation, and escape from biological limits. The language is secular, but the structure is unmistakably religious. There are messianic figures,   sacred objects, and redemption narratives oriented toward immortality or cosmic significance. Death is not accepted. It is treated as a technical problem waiting to be solved.

Social justice movements can function in a similar way when they become the primary source of identity, moral orientation, and meaning. The impulse toward justice, dignity, and liberation is real and necessary. But when a movement becomes the sole container for existential meaning, it begins to develop religious characteristics: purity codes, rituals of confession, heresy boundaries, and forms of exile that replace repair. Moral failure becomes identity failure. Nuance becomes betrayal. Forgiveness becomes rare.

Again, this isn’t about whether these causes are right or wrong. It’s about structure. Any system that carries the full weight of meaning will behave like a religion, whether it admits that or not.

The danger isn’t that these new religions exist. It’s that many of them operate without the stabilizing features that older traditions developed over time: humility, elders, ritualized repair, symbolic depth, and limits on moral absolutism. Without those, belief systems become brittle. When they fracture, they tend to fracture violently inward, producing burnout, shame, or exile.

From this vantage point, secular modernity hasn’t eliminated religion. It has multiplied it. Meaning has been unbundled and redistributed across identity, politics, technology, wellness, and self-expression. The sacred hasn’t vanished. It’s fragmented.

The deeper issue is not belief, but awareness. When people insist they are “non-religious,” they often lose the ability to see how much power their chosen systems hold over them. Unacknowledged belief tends to be more rigid, not less. When meaning systems go unnamed, they can’t be examined. When they can’t be examined, they can’t mature.

This is where artists, thinkers, and creators often occupy a strange middle ground. Creative practice can serve as a way to metabolize existential anxiety without demanding total allegiance to a single belief system. Art doesn’t promise salvation. It leaves residue. It holds ambiguity rather than resolving it. It allows meaning to emerge without pretending it will last.

In a culture struggling to live without shared containers for meaning, that matters.

The question isn’t whether you’re religious. The question is what you’re using to orient yourself inside uncertainty, suffering, and mortality. What stories you live by. What rituals you repeat. What communities you belong to. What promises keep you going when things fall apart.

Any system that becomes the sole container for existential meaning will behave like a religion.

The work, then, is not to escape belief, but to become more conscious of it.

Animality: The Part of Us We Keep Trying to Forget

One of the simplest but hardest ideas for people to accept is that we are animals who know we will die.

That sentence alone has more psychological weight than most of us want to deal with. We are more than just living things that move through time. We are aware of ourselves, and our bodies get older, break down, and disappear. And we know this. That information alters everything.

This is where Ernest Becker begins. In The Denial of Death, Becker posited that human psychology is influenced by a fundamental contradiction. We are biological entities motivated by instinct, hunger, fear, and reproduction; concurrently, we are symbolic entities endowed with imagination, language, and self-reflection. We have bodies that will die, and our minds can picture that death before it happens. The conflict between those two facts never goes away. It just gets taken care of.

That tension is right in the middle of animality.

Being an animal means being weak. People bleed. Bodies decay. Bodies break down. That doesn't change, no matter how smart or culturally accomplished you are. But most of modern life is set up to keep that truth far away. We keep the dying out of sight. We make decay into a medical issue. We raise the mind, the self, the brand, and the legacy as if they could somehow float away from the body.

Terror Management Theory says that this is not a coincidence. When reminders of our animal nature break through, like illness, aging, death, or even some kinds of art, they make us anxious on a deep, often unconscious level. The answer is almost never calm, though. It's protection. We hold on to our identities, beliefs, status, and moral frameworks more tightly when they promise that we are more than just meat that is going to die out.

The skull has always been one of the best ways to show this problem. It takes away everything that makes us who we are, reminding us that we are just physical matter with a time limit. Skulls don't fight. They don't talk about it. They just give testimony.

Rachel and Ross Menzies talk about how much of human behavior is based on avoiding this confrontation in their book Mortals. Not just being afraid of dying, but being afraid of being an animal that has to die. We deal with that fear by keeping busy, doing health rituals, telling success stories, and always trying to be better. In most cases, the goal is not to live forever. It is a mental distance from what will happen to the body.

That's what this picture is trying to show.

The Glasshead–Stoneman is standing up, put together, and almost ceremonial. The stone blocks make up a body that looks solid, scarred, planned, and calm. The glass head on top is clear, glowing, broken, and fragile. Skulls float behind it, not quite there and not quite gone. They didn't read as reminders of death, but as witnesses. The truth about animals is there, but it won't stay out of the way.

Glass is important here. Heat and violence make glass. It looks like it will last forever, but it breaks easily. It shows its own cracks while carrying light. It is an uncomfortable material that is between solid and broken. A lot like the human self.

Stone suggests strength. Glass makes things look fragile. The skulls show that something is going to happen.

They make a quiet argument that no amount of structure or symbolic architecture can change our animal nature. We can make identities. We can add meaning. We can give ourselves names. But the body is still there. The animal is still there. Death stays.

Even though it makes people uncomfortable, this is not a negative statement. Becker himself thought that this tension is what makes creativity, art, and meaning come to life. The issue does not stem from our animalistic nature. The issue is that we put so much effort into pretending we aren't.

Art does something important for the mind when it lets animality back into the room without being showy or moralizing. It lowers the defenses just enough for the person to be recognized. Don't panic. Acknowledgment. The kind that says, "This is what we have to work with."

The Glasshead–Stoneman does not fix the problem. It doesn't make you feel better. It just keeps the animal and the symbol in the same frame, not letting either one go away.

That might be enough.

Because confronting our animality does not diminish the significance of life. It makes it sharper. It reminds us that everything we build, love, and make is done inside a body that will eventually fail. And oddly enough, that's what makes those actions important.

Working With Academia Without Being Rewritten

Yes, I’m working on a PhD. But that fact is routinely mistaken for the point.

The degree is not the axis around which my thinking turns. It’s a container. A temporary structure. Useful, sometimes generative, occasionally constraining. What it is not is an origin story, nor a corrective arc meant to sand down who I already am.

One of the tensions I keep encountering in academic spaces is the tendency to read clarity as rigidity. When a student speaks with confidence about what they are doing, why they are doing it, and where they are not willing to go, that clarity is often interpreted as resistance. As if seriousness of intent must signal a closed mind. As if conviction is incompatible with learning.

I don’t experience it that way.

I’m in my sixties. I’ve lived abroad for years at a time. I’ve made art for over three decades, long enough to watch entire theoretical fashions rise, harden, and quietly disappear. I’ve failed publicly. I’ve revised privately. I’ve changed in ways that mattered and refused change when it felt performative or hollow. That history doesn’t make me inflexible; it makes me selective.

There’s a recurring assumption in academia that improvement requires visible transformation. That a “good” student emerges looking markedly different than when they arrived. New language. New posture. New allegiances. Sometimes even a kind of aesthetic conversion. Growth becomes legible only when it announces itself as rupture.

But not all development works that way.

Some learning deepens rather than redirects. Some refinement sharpens what is already there instead of replacing it. For practitioners who come in with a long arc behind them, progress often looks less like reinvention and more like compression. Fewer detours. Cleaner lines. A stronger refusal of what doesn’t belong.

That kind of maturation can read as stubbornness if one expects the student to be plastic.

I actually like my program. I respect the faculty. I value the conversations. I’m not at war with academia. But I am uninterested in being improved in ways that dilute the very work I came to do. I’m here to articulate, not to audition. To clarify, not to contort myself into novelty for novelty’s sake.

If there is change happening, and there is, it’s happening subterraneously. It’s happening in how precisely I can name what matters, how quickly I can discard what doesn’t, and how calmly I can hold my ground when someone suggests that seriousness requires surrender.

I’m pursuing this path in my way. Not despite academia, but not because of its appetite for visible transformation either. I’m not here to become someone else. I’m here to say, with more precision than before, who I already am and why that stance matters.

That distinction feels worth defending.

The Red Hand Problem

How artists metabolize existential anxiety, and why the work still matters.

I keep returning to the same question, no matter how many theories I read or objects I make: What exactly happens to existential anxiety when it moves through the hands of an artist?

Not rhetorically. Mechanically. Psychologically.

The image above is one attempt to make that process visible. Three pale figures stand upright, stripped of detail, reduced almost to afterimages. They are not portraits so much as placeholders. Awareness has rendered their bodies thin. Over them reaches a red hand, oversized and intrusive, neither comforting nor gentle. It interrupts and intrudes. It stains. It marks.

That hand is not expression. It is intervention.

Most people manage death anxiety by keeping it diffuse, by never letting it fully localize. The artist does the opposite. The anxiety is brought forward, concentrated, and given a task. Creation becomes a site of containment. The fear does not disappear, but it changes state. It becomes workable.

This is what I mean by metabolizing existential anxiety. Not purging it. Not transcending it. Converting it into form.

Psychologically, this matters more than we often admit. The act of making gives the anxious mind boundaries. Time slows. Attention narrows. The self becomes less abstract and more procedural. The question shifts from What does it all mean? to What happens if I put this here? That shift is not trivial. It is regulatory. It allows consciousness to stay in contact with mortality without flooding.

The white figures in the image are not victims. They are witnesses. They stand because the hand is doing something on their behalf.

This is where arts-based research comes into focus for me. ABR is often framed as alternative knowledge production, which is true but incomplete. Its deeper value lies in its psychological function. Making becomes a way of thinking that does not rely exclusively on symbolic abstraction. Image, material, gesture, and repetition—these are not illustrations of insight; they are the insight.

When anxiety stays purely cognitive, it spirals. When it enters the body through making, it circulates. It acquires rhythm. It becomes legible.

This brings me to the harder question: is there any value in writing books like Glass Bones and Rupture?

If the goal were resolution, probably not. No book resolves the fact of death. No theory seals the crack. But that has never been the real task. The value lies in creating sustained containers where anxiety can be held long enough to be examined without collapsing into distraction or denial.

These books are not answers. They are pressure vessels.

Writing them will force me to stay with the material—psychologically and ethically—longer than images alone sometimes allow. It slows the metabolism. It traces the process. It makes visible what is usually hidden: how fear becomes form, how rupture becomes method, and how meaning is provisional but still worth making.

The red hand, then, is also authorship. It is the decision to intervene rather than look away. To touch the thing that makes us uncomfortable and accept the consequences of contact.

Artists do not escape existential anxiety (not at all). They work it. They give it edges. They give it weight. They give it somewhere to go.

That’s not a cure.
But it is a practice.
And in a culture built on denial, practice may be the most honest form of value we have left.

Immortality Projects and Creative Works

What Mortals Gets Right, and Where Artists Complicate the Picture

One of the quiet strengths of Mortals: How the Fear of Death Shaped Human Society is its refusal to treat death anxiety as an abstract philosophical problem. Rachel and Ross Menzies frame it instead as an organizing force that shapes what we build, preserve, admire, and remember. Culture, in this view, is not ornamental. It is defensive architecture.

Chapter 4, “Immortality Projects and Creative Works,” brings that argument into direct contact with art. Here, the authors situate creative production within a long human effort to leave a durable trace—to announce, across time, I was here (Menzies & Menzies, 2021, pp. 63–64). From prehistoric cave hands to frescoes, literature, monuments, and modern celebrity rituals, artistic acts are presented as symbolic bids against erasure.

This framing aligns closely with Ernest Becker’s claim that humans manage mortality awareness through symbolic immortality projects—systems that promise meaning, continuity, or remembrance beyond the body (Becker, 1973). Art, in Mortals, is one such system. It does not transcend death; it negotiates with it.

What the chapter does particularly well is resist romanticism. The authors emphasize that lasting creative immortality is exceedingly rare. Most works disappear. Most names fade. Even figures like Shakespeare or Khufu are treated ambivalently: their symbolic endurance is extraordinary, but its psychological payoff remains uncertain (Menzies & Menzies, 2021, pp. 84–85). The pursuit of permanence, they suggest, often extracts enormous human cost and may ultimately feel hollow.

Where the chapter becomes especially interesting is in its treatment of failed immortality. Across literature and myth—from Gilgamesh to Frankenstein to modern vampire narratives—immortality is repeatedly portrayed as bleak, corrosive, or monstrous. These stories rarely celebrate eternal life. Instead, they expose its emptiness and moral cost, often emerging from grief or loss rather than triumph (Menzies & Menzies, 2021, pp. 73–84).

(Text from Amazon)
Human society is shaped by many things, but underlying them all is one fundamental force - our fear of death. This is the ground-breaking theory explored in Mortals.
The ground-breaking book that uncovers how our fear of death is the hidden driver of most of humankind's endeavours.
The human mind can grapple with the future, visualising and calculating solutions to complex problems, giving us tremendous advantages over other species throughout our evolution. However, this capability comes with a curse. By five to ten years of age, all humans know where they are heading: to the grave.

At one point, the authors make a subtle but important shift. They suggest that rather than chasing permanence through monuments or legacy, a “much simpler form of therapy” may lie in exploring death and mortality within creative works themselves (Menzies & Menzies, 2021, p. 84). Art, here, is not a guarantee of immortality. It is a container for mortality awareness.

This is where the chapter opens onto a question it does not fully pursue.

Throughout Chapter 4, artists are treated as vivid examples of a universal human strategy, not as a psychologically distinct group. Creative work is framed as one form of symbolic defense among many. The book does not claim that artists tolerate death anxiety differently, keep mortality awareness closer to consciousness, or rely less on denial. From a Beckerian perspective, this is consistent: everyone participates in hero-systems; artists simply build theirs in visible form.

Yet the material gestures toward something more complex. When creative work repeatedly stages death, critiques immortality fantasies, or dwells inside impermanence rather than fleeing it, the function of art begins to look less like reassurance and more like exposure. Otto Rank suggested that art could function not merely as denial, but as a disciplined confrontation with finitude—a way of shaping terror rather than anesthetizing it (Rank, 1932).

Mortals does not make that distinction explicit. But it leaves space for it.

The open question, then, is not whether art is an immortality project. The chapter makes that case convincingly. The question is whether some forms of creative practice do something slightly different: not promising permanence, but training attention to stay with impermanence without collapsing. If so, artists may not escape death anxiety—but they may metabolize it differently.

That is not a conclusion Mortals draws. It is a pressure the book invites.

References

Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death. Free Press.

Menzies, R. E., & Menzies, R. G. (2021). Mortals: How the fear of death shaped human society. Allen & Unwin.

Rank, O. (1932). Art and artist. Knopf.

Interview With Dr. R. Michael Fisher: Careers of Folly and Wisdom

In this conversation, I sit down with Dr. R. Michael Fisher for Careers of Folly and Wisdom (Episode 3) at the close of 2025, and we trace the strange overlap between two lives shaped by study, teaching, and the long arc of existential pressure. What begins as a simple introduction quickly becomes a deeper exchange about why some ideas take decades to name and why the hardest work is often learning how to speak those ideas in public without having them reduced to something smaller.

We talk about how we connected through Southwestern College’s Visionary Practice & Regenerative Leadership doctoral program and why I went searching for faculty whose work could actually hold what I’m building: an arts-based inquiry into creativity, mortality, and the psychological machinery of denial. I share my early “folly” at residency, where I became “the death guy” despite my real focus being the opposite: what happens inside the dash between birth and death, and how the knowledge of impermanence reshapes a human life. That misreading became a kind of field experiment in real time, revealing how quickly people reroute mortality talk into safer channels like grief, loss, or therapeutic language. It also forced me to sharpen my communication, not by diluting the thesis, but by learning how to meet the audience where the “dimmer switch” is already working.

From there, the conversation widens. Dr. Fisher pushes on the themes of education, fallibility, and maturity: how a person with deep content and lived experience learns to teach without preaching, and how humility becomes an actual method. I bring in two foundational touchstones that anchor my work: Becker’s insistence that death terror is a mainspring of human activity and Rank’s claim (via Becker) that the artist takes in the world and reworks it rather than being crushed by it. That tension is the engine of my research question: if most of culture is organized to keep death out of view, what do artists do differently with that same pressure, consciously or unconsciously?

A major thread running through the interview is that denial is not just a personal quirk. It’s cultural, political, and historical. I talk about early experiences that formed my worldview, including family stories that complicate simple narratives of “normal” American life, and how those early exposures shaped my sensitivity to power, erasure, and the stories nations tell themselves. We also move into my military background, where I describe the kind of learning you don’t go looking for: the collision between youthful exceptionalism and the realities of violence, trauma, and institutional harm, including witnessing suicide deaths while working as a photographer. The folly, as I name it, is the arrogance of certainty; the wisdom is the painful clarity that comes after the myth breaks.

In the final stretch, we pivot to Dr. Fisher’s work in fearology and his reframing of Terror Management Theory as, in many ways, a kind of “fear management education.” That exchange matters because it shows the real stakes of language: fear, terror, anxiety, and denial. These aren’t interchangeable terms, and both of us have been forced to grapple with how quickly audiences collapse complex ideas into familiar clichés. We end with a concise statement of my own working thesis, offered almost like a poem: artists tend to give anxiety form rather than discharge it through denial; material practice slows experience enough for mortality to move into objects; rupture is where meaning fails, and art often happens there; the ethic is not to “fix” the break, but to stay present with it.

The conversation closes on an honest note about the cost of passion. We talk about parenting, devotion to work, and the ways even meaningful lives leave blind spots in their wake. If this episode has a through-line, it’s that wisdom is rarely clean. It comes out of misfires, misreadings, and the slow work of learning how to hold the real without turning it into a brand, a sermon, or a therapy session.

I really enjoyed the conversation, and I look forward to working with Dr. Fisher. Check out his YouTube channel and his other interviews and commentary.

Denial: Self-Deception, False Beliefs, and the Origins of the Human Mind

“An organism that fully comprehends the inevitability of its own death should be at a severe evolutionary disadvantage.”

Ajit Varki & Danny Brower

Denial: Self-Deception, False Beliefs, and the Origins of the Human Mind

I want to start by saying why Varki and Brower’s work matters so much to me and why it landed with such force when I first encountered it.

When I talk about their theory, I’m really talking about anthropogeny (an-thro-poge-nee). Not anthropogeny as a list of fossils, dates, or branching diagrams, but anthropogeny as a psychological crossing.

A moment when a creature stops merely responding to the world and begins to recognize itself inside it. When experience turns inward. When danger stops being episodic and becomes existential. When the mind realizes that every threat ends the same way.

Most stories we tell about human evolution focus on our successes. Intelligence. Language. Cooperation. Ingenuity. All of that is real, and all of it matters. But those stories usually glide past a more disturbing question: what happens when a creature becomes capable of knowing that it will die?

If mortality is taken seriously as a psychological event, not just a biological fact, then becoming human is not a clean victory.

It’s a rupture.

Awareness overshoots what an organism should be able to tolerate. Varki and Brower approach this problem not as philosophers or poets, but as biologists asking a brutally simple question: how did a species survive once it could clearly comprehend its own annihilation?

Their answer is denial.

Not denial as ignorance. Not denial as constant delusion. But denial as an evolved capacity. A way of softening reality just enough to stay functional.

In their view, human consciousness did not emerge cleanly at all. It arrived with a built-in workaround. A mechanism that allows unbearable truths to be known without being allowed to dominate awareness completely.

They call this moment the Mind Over Reality Transition, or M.O.R.T. It names the point in human evolution when the mind became powerful enough to override raw perception in order to stay alive.

Before this transition, animals respond directly to reality.

Danger appears, the body reacts.

Hunger arises, the organism seeks food.

There is fear, but there is no sustained awareness of an inevitable end.

Reality is immediate and actionable.

M.O.R.T. marks the moment when human cognition crossed a threshold.

Our ancestors became capable of understanding not just threats, but outcomes. Not just danger, but inevitability.

They could imagine the future, reflect on themselves, and recognize that no amount of intelligence, strength, or cooperation ultimately prevents death.

That level of awareness should have been catastrophic. A creature that fully understands its own unavoidable extinction should freeze, withdraw from risk, fail to reproduce, and disappear from the evolutionary record.

According to Varki and Brower, we didn’t disappear because something else evolved at the same time. The ability to let the mind partially override reality. To soften, distort, postpone, or symbolically reframe what is known: M.O.R.T.

M.O.R.T. is not about denying facts. It’s about regulating attention. It allows the mind to know something is true without holding it at full intensity. Mortality is understood, but kept in the background.

Present, but not paralyzing.

This is why humans can plan for the future, take risks, fall in love, make art, raise children, and build civilizations while fully aware that all of it ends. The mind learns to place symbolic meaning, narrative, and purpose between itself and raw reality.

In this sense, M.O.R.T. is not a flaw. It’s an adaptive solution. A psychological buffer that makes consciousness livable.

And once that buffer exists, everything we call culture becomes possible. These aren’t secondary inventions layered on top of survival. They are how survival continues in the presence of unbearable knowledge.

If the full weight of mortality stayed fully present all the time, the system would collapse. Panic. Paralysis. Withdrawal from risk. Failure to function.

That softening is everywhere once you know how to look for it. You can recognize it in yourself, too.

This is where Varki and Brower quietly meet Ernest Becker. Becker argued that culture is a defense against death.

Varki and Brower push the idea deeper. They suggest that the capacity for defense is built into the structure of consciousness itself. We don’t just learn denial through culture. We inherit the ability to manage reality through it.

Once that sinks in, creativity stops looking like decoration.

It stops looking like leisure or self-expression.

It begins to look like a survival strategy.

Making images.

Telling stories.

Leaving traces.

Building meaning systems.

These are not optional human add-ons. They are how a symbolic animal stays operational while knowing the end is coming.

This is where my own work keeps pressing.

Artists tend to stand close to that fault line.

We turn the dimmer switch up more often than most.

We look longer.

We tolerate more exposure.

Sometimes we manage to metabolize what we see into form.

And sometimes it nearly breaks us.

In plain terms, Varki and Brower are saying this: humans survived not because we learned the truth, but because we learned how to live near the truth without being destroyed by it.

That tension, between knowing and not knowing too much, is the thread I keep following. It’s where consciousness fractures, culture begins, and art becomes necessary.

The Fragile Self Behind Big Achievements

The Fragile Self Behind Big Achievements
What ambition reveals about death anxiety

The more I study Becker, the more I see how much of human insecurity comes down to one uncomfortable truth: most people are terrified of disappearing. They don’t usually say it that way. It comes out in softer language—ambition, legacy, accomplishment, contribution. But underneath those words is the ache Becker described so clearly: the fear of being insignificant in a world that will go on without us (Becker, 1973).

When I watch artists chase exhibitions, press coverage, museum collections, and permanent inclusion in the cultural record, I no longer read it as arrogance. I read it as fragility. I recognize the same existential wound I feel in myself when I’m honest. These gestures are attempts to fortify the self against erasure, to secure a foothold in history. They are ways of saying, “I was here. I mattered. I didn’t disappear without a trace.”

Becker understood this clearly. What looks like confidence from the outside is often a quiet negotiation with death. It’s a way of saying, “Something of me stays.” That longing comes straight out of what Becker called our need for heroism—the urge to feel like we matter in a universe that is largely indifferent to us (Becker, 1973).

What’s interesting is that this insecurity doesn’t look like insecurity. On the surface, it looks like confidence, drive, and success. Psychologically, though, achievement often becomes a proxy for survival. Terror Management Theory shows this with brutal clarity: when you remind people, even subtly, that they will die, they double down on whatever gives them a sense of meaning, status, or significance. They defend their worldviews more aggressively, seek more recognition, and cling harder to the systems that tell them they matter (Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 2015). Legacy becomes a way to negotiate with finitude rather than face it.

I see this constantly in the world I inhabit. The wet collodion community is a perfect example. On the surface, it’s about chemistry, craft, and technique—the miracle of coaxing an image out of silver and developer. But underneath, it carries the same existential insecurity that moves people everywhere else. There’s endless competition to appear more knowledgeable, more skilled, and more “authentic.” The constant stream of social media posts saying, “Look at me, I’m the best, I know the most about the process!” isn’t really about photography. It’s about being seen. It’s about proving you matter in a tiny world inside a vast, indifferent universe.

Technical mastery becomes another form of symbolic immortality. If I know the most, if I can produce the cleanest plates, if others admire my work or defer to my expertise, then maybe—just maybe—I won’t feel the tremor of my own impermanence for a moment. It’s the same psychology behind names on buildings and monuments, only expressed through a nineteenth-century photographic technique and the illusion that knowledge itself can make us safe. Underneath, it’s the same fear: if I’m not exceptional, I might vanish.

For years, I chased my own version of legacy without naming it. I wanted the exhibitions, the books, the mastery, and the recognition. I told myself it was about the work, and some of it truly was. But if I’m honest, part of it was the same old story. I wanted to leave a mark that might outlive me. I wanted to matter in a way the universe couldn’t erase.

That’s shifted for me. Not because I’ve outgrown ambition, but because I’ve faced the fact that none of it lasts. Even the most celebrated artists eventually fade. Even the most beautiful plate will tarnish, break, or disappear. Even the sharpest knowledge dulls when the next generation arrives. Mortality has a way of clearing the air.

I’ve come to see that symbolic immortality exists on a spectrum. Some people seek it through children. Others through service. Others through work or institutions. And some go very big, because the anxiety underneath is just as large. The louder the legacy project, the more fragile the self underneath it tends to be. The person isn’t trying to be admired. They’re trying to survive their own awareness of impermanence.

This is where my work as an artist diverges from these cultural immortality systems. Most people try to outlive death by attaching themselves to institutions or authority structures. In photography, that can mean trying to become the expert, the master, the one others look to as an anchor of certainty. Artists—at least those who confront mortality directly—metabolize that same fear through creation rather than performance. Art becomes a way to live with death instead of outrunning it.

One system says, “Remember me.”
The other says, “This is what it feels like to be mortal.”

That distinction is changing my practice. I’m not trying to build a monument to myself, inside or outside the collodion world. I’m trying to understand what it means to stand here for a moment, knowing the moment ends. Creativity, in that sense, isn’t a buffer. It’s a reckoning. It’s how I listen to the part of myself that knows I will die and give that knowledge form instead of choking on it. Art lets me leave a trace without pretending the trace is a cure for impermanence.

And now I want to turn the questions back to you, because Becker wasn’t writing about other people. He was writing about all of us.

What are you building to feel permanent?
Whose approval keeps you from feeling invisible?
What are you clinging to because the thought of disappearing feels unbearable?
What version of symbolic immortality are you chasing—career, legacy, reputation, mastery, certainty, perfection?

And maybe the most important question:

What would your life and your art look like if you stopped trying to outlive death and started learning how to live with it?

That’s the shift I’m making. I don’t know where it leads yet, but I can feel the work changing. My attention is moving from achievement to awareness, from legacy to presence, from performance to honesty. Maybe that’s its own kind of immortality—not the kind that gets your name on a building, but the kind that allows you to be fully alive in the time you have.

How the New Work Reflects This Shift

If you’ve been following my recent work—the figures, the new plates, the Sun Mountain project—you may have noticed the change before I did. The work isn’t trying to prove anything anymore. It isn’t trying to be perfect or technically untouchable. It isn’t even trying to last.

These pieces come from a different place. The clay figures, with their brittle limbs and suspended bodies, don’t posture for importance. They surrender. They acknowledge breakage. They know gravity always wins. They are small acts of honesty about what it means to be human.

The plates carry a different kind of imperfection now. The mottle marks, developer sweeps, and fogging—once treated as errors—feel more like evidence. Traces of a hand that doesn’t pretend it can control everything. Silver remembers everything, and lately I’m less interested in correcting that memory than in listening to it.

And Sun Mountain has been the biggest teacher. Photographing a place saturated with history, trauma, beauty, and silence forced me to encounter mortality not as an idea but as something lived. The land, the scars, the prayer trees—temporary, fragile, and somehow more meaningful because of that. Those images aren’t about legacy. They’re about witnessing.

This shift has changed my process. I no longer enter the studio or darkroom trying to outperform anyone—not myself, not the collodion community, not the ghosts of the masters. I enter trying to listen. To let the work unfold rather than force it into a monument.

If earlier years of my practice were about building a name, this chapter is about losing one. Letting the ego loosen. Letting the work breathe without the burden of permanence.

Maybe this is the quiet wisdom Becker gestured toward: when we stop trying to escape death, the art gets quieter and more honest. It stops reaching upward and starts reaching inward. And in that shift, something opens—not immortality, but meaning.

If You Think This Doesn’t Apply to You

Some people will read this and say, “I’m not doing that. I’m not chasing legacy. I don’t have death anxiety.” I get it. I used to say the same thing. Most of us do, because these defenses don’t feel like defenses. They feel like personality. Preference. “Just the way I am.”

The denial of death rarely announces itself. It works under the surface. Becker was blunt about this: the mechanisms we use to manage mortality awareness are almost always unconscious (Becker, 1973). Terror Management Theory confirms the same point. People can swear they’re unaffected by death, then shift their behavior the moment mortality becomes salient, without ever realizing why (Solomon et al., 2015).

So if you feel the instinct to say “not me,” pause and look a little closer.

Do you get irritated when someone challenges your beliefs?
Do you feel threatened when someone succeeds in a way you hoped to?
Do you rely on your role, talents, expertise, or identity to feel stable?
Do you need to be right? Respected? Seen?
Do you cling to certain narratives about yourself because losing them would feel like losing solid ground?

None of this means you’re weak. It means you’re human. Your psyche is doing exactly what it evolved to do: protect you from the unbearable fact that life ends and none of us controls the timing.

Understanding this didn’t make me ashamed. It made me awake. Gentler. Less judgmental of myself and others. Clarity, not legacy, is the beginning of meaning.

Closing Reflection

I’m no longer making work to prove I was here. I’m making work to understand what here even means. Becker helped me see that much of what I once called ambition was another shield against impermanence. Facing mortality—through theory, lived experience, and decades of practice—showed me that legacy was never the answer.

What I want now is quieter and more honest. Art that doesn’t try to outlive me but helps me live while I’m here.

I invite you to look at your own life with the same clarity. What are you building to avoid impermanence? What would your creative work, your relationships, and your sense of self look like if you stopped reaching for permanence and learned to stand inside the temporary?

That’s where the real transformation begins. Not in being remembered, but in finally being present.

References

Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death. Free Press.
Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., & Pyszczynski, T. (2015). The worm at the core: On the role of death in life. Random House.

Living With The Dimmer Switch

One of the biggest challenges I face when I talk about Becker, Rank, Zapffe, or Terror Management Theory isn’t that the ideas are too complex. It’s that they’re describing the very psychological machinery that makes them difficult to understand in the first place. (Becker, 1973; Greenberg et al., 1986; Rank, 1932; Zapffe, 1933/2010).

That’s the paradox.

From an evolutionary perspective, human consciousness didn’t just give us language, imagination, and culture. It gave us a problem no other animal has to solve: we know we’re going to die, and we know it with enough clarity to make life unbearable if that awareness stayed fully online all the time (Becker, 1973; Solomon et al., 2015). So evolution didn’t eliminate the problem. It built a workaround.

These thinkers essentially suggest that the human mind evolved a dimmer switch mechanism. This is not an on-off switch, but rather a regulator (Jacobson, 2025). With too much awareness of death, the organism freezes, panics, or collapses. Too little, and life loses urgency, meaning, and care (Becker, 1973; Yalom, 2008).

So the psyche learned to keep mortality awareness just low enough to function and just high enough to motivate (Greenberg et al., 1986; Solomon et al., 2015).

That’s why so many people genuinely believe they don’t think about death or aren’t afraid of dying. They’re not lying. The system is working exactly as it’s supposed to (Greenberg et al., 1986; Pyszczynski et al., 2015). These defenses operate beneath conscious awareness, the same way breathing or balance does. You don’t feel yourself regulating your blood pressure either, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.

In fact, one of the clearest signs that death anxiety is present is the firm belief that it isn’t (Solomon et al., 2015).

Becker’s insight was never that people walk around consciously terrified. It was that culture exists to make sure they don’t have to (Becker, 1973). Worldviews, identities, careers, religions, politics, moral certainty, and even the idea of being a “good person” quietly serve the same psychological function: they tell us we matter in a universe that otherwise wouldn’t notice our disappearance (Becker, 1973; Greenberg et al., 1986). Once those structures are in place, the fear drops out of awareness. The dimmer switch does its job (Jacobson, 2025).

This is also why these ideas often provoke irritation or dismissal instead of curiosity. When someone encounters them for the first time, they aren’t just learning new information. They’re brushing up against the scaffolding that holds their sense of reality together. The mind doesn’t experience that as insight. It experiences it as a threat (Greenberg et al., 1986; Pyszczynski et al., 2015). The response isn’t “Is this true?” so much as “Why does this feel wrong?”

Zapffe pushed this even further and suggested that consciousness itself may be over-equipped for the world it inhabits. We see too much, anticipate too far ahead, and know too well how the story ends (Zapffe, 1933/2010). The defenses he described—isolation, distraction, anchoring, and sublimation—aren’t moral failures. They’re survival strategies (Zapffe, 1933/2010). Without them, the weight of existence would be crushing. So when people recoil from these ideas, they’re doing exactly what the human animal evolved to do.

This is where my work sits.

Artists tend to live closer to that fault line. It's not because we're braver or more enlightened, but rather because creative practice weakens the dimmer switch (Jacobson, 2025; Rank, 1932). Making art requires attention, dwelling, repetition, and exposure. Over time, some of the automatic defenses erode. You keep looking where others glance away. That doesn’t make life easier. It makes it more honest.

This is why arts-based research matters so much to me (Barone & Eisner, 2012). I’m not trying to convince anyone with arguments alone. I’m showing what happens when someone lives with the dimmer turned slightly higher than average and then tries to metabolize what comes into view. The artifacts aren’t illustrations of theory. They are the evidence of a nervous system and a psyche working under different conditions.

So when someone says, “I don’t have death anxiety,” I hear, “My defenses are intact.” And when they say, “This feels abstract,” I hear, “This is getting too close to something I’ve spent my life not naming.”

That isn’t a failure of communication. It’s the terrain.

My work isn’t about forcing understanding. It’s about creating conditions where understanding can happen without overwhelming the person encountering it (Barone & Eisner, 2012; Jacobson, 2025). That’s why I move through story, image, material, land, and memory. I’m not avoiding theory. I’m respecting the psychology that makes theory hard to hear in the first place (Becker, 1973; Solomon et al., 2015).

And in that sense, the difficulty isn’t a flaw in these ideas.

It’s the sound the dimmer switch makes when you try to turn it up.

The resistance.
The discomfort.
The urge to look away.

Those aren’t misunderstandings.

They’re the evidence.

References

Barone, T., & Eisner, E. W. (2012). Arts-based research. SAGE.

Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death. Free Press.

Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T., & Solomon, S. (1986). The causes and consequences of a need for self-esteem: A terror management theory. In R. F. Baumeister (Ed.), Public self and private self (pp. 189–212). Springer.

Jacobson, Q. (2025). Living with the dimmer switch [Blog post manuscript]. Unpublished.

Pyszczynski, T., Solomon, S., & Greenberg, J. (2015). Thirty years of terror management theory: From genesis to revelation. In J. M. Olson & M. P. Zanna (Eds.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 52, pp. 1–70). Academic Press.

Rank, O. (1932). Art and artist: Creative urge and personality development. W. W. Norton.

Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., & Pyszczynski, T. (2015). The worm at the core: On the role of death in life. Random House.

Yalom, I. D. (2008). Staring at the sun: Overcoming the terror of death. Jossey-Bass.

Zapffe, P. W. (2010). The last messiah. (Original work published 1933)