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.”

— Quinn Jacobson

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?”

— Quinn Jacobson

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.

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.”

— Quinn Jacobson

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Death, Meaning, and the Lie of Perpetual Happiness

I recently read Alan Blum’s article, Death, Happiness and the Meaning of Life: The View from Sociology (2014), and it hit close to home.

For all the talk we hear in sociology about class, structure, or behavior, mortality rarely gets its due. Blum makes the case that death is in fact a ghost that haunts the foundations of classical sociology—even if it rarely shows its face. Think Durkheim, Marx, Weber, and especially Simmel. The question of death isn’t absent—it’s just buried under the weight of categories, work ethics, and ideal types.

Blum argues that modern bourgeois life is built around avoiding death and ignoring the deeper questions of meaning. He calls it “practical thinking,” but what he’s really pointing to is a kind of cultural anesthesia. We’re trained to keep death at arm’s length—personally, socially, and even academically. Happiness becomes the pursuit, and death becomes the thing that threatens it.

That’s not new, of course. Ernest Becker said the same thing in The Denial of Death. Otto Rank said it decades earlier. But what Blum does is bring this denial right into the heart of sociological theory, and in doing so, he opens a door most people would rather leave shut.

The Artist’s Role at the Edge

I connected with his treatment of Georg Simmel—the only classical theorist who didn’t shy away from death. Simmel saw death as form-giving. That phrase stopped me. Death gives shape to life. It makes us ask the questions that matter. It compels us to create, not just to produce. And it demands we live with a sense of form—of meaning, of purpose—not just survival.

Simmel writes, “In every single moment of life we are those who must die” (2007, p. 73). That awareness changes how we live—if we’re awake to it. Most aren’t. Most sleepwalk through life, as Heraclitus might say, distracted by the day-to-day. And that’s by design. Bourgeois culture has given us the tools to stay asleep: comfort, consumption, self-optimization. The pursuit of happiness has become a cultural sedative.

But artists don’t get to sleep. At least not the kind I’m interested in. We stand at the edge, facing death, and we make something out of it. It’s not a job—it’s a necessity.

Death as a Sociological Force

Blum reads Durkheim, Marx, and Weber through this lens too. Durkheim didn’t ignore death; he just buried it in statistics. In Suicide (1951), he shows how social categories—gender, class, religion—impact life and death. But those categories are dead until they’re animated by lived experience. Until they speak.

Weber saw death anxiety expressed through the Protestant work ethic—a compulsive need to prove one’s worth in the absence of salvation. And Marx saw the whole capitalist machine as a distraction from the futility of existence. The bourgeoisie keep moving, keep acquiring, keep revising their résumés because they can’t bear to stop and ask what any of it means.

Sound familiar?

It should. It’s the same story Becker told, just told in different language. And it’s the story many artists live—especially those of us working at the edge of history, memory, and mortality.

Against the City, Toward the Limit

Blum uses “the city” as a metaphor for this cultural deadening. The city is where goods circulate, people chase happiness, and no one wants to talk about death. In Lacan’s terms, the city is the site of desire detached from meaning. It's where the bourgeois dream is kept alive—not by truth, but by repetition.

But death always slips through the cracks.

It shows up in our dreams, our breakdowns, our art. And when it does, it brings everything into question. That’s what Blum calls “thinking at the limit.” It’s what I think of as the necessary work of the artist. Not to romanticize death, but to sit with it. To refuse the lie that happiness is the point of life. To tell the truth, even when that truth is uncomfortable.

Final Thoughts

This article reminded me why I make the work I make. Why I write the way I write. Why I teach what I teach. It’s not about mastering death. It’s about refusing to forget it. Because when we forget death, we lose the thread. We start making things that don’t matter. We trade meaning for comfort. We become the living dead.

Simmel refused that trade. So did Becker. So do the artists I admire most.

Facing death isn’t about morbidity—it’s about vitality. It’s about making something honest in a world that keeps asking us to look away. That’s the work.

That’s the only work.

Heidegger: "Being-Towards-Death," The Creative and Ethical Edge

I just read a paper called “HEIDEGGER’S ANALYSIS OF DEATH: A REFLECTION ON MODERN MAN’S ‘LOSS’ OF DEATH’S MEANING AND REFERENCE TO LIFE.” By Ssekanjakko Vincent Bonny.

I wanted to share some thoughts on how it connects to my interests.

Heidegger wasn’t interested in death as a clinical event. He wasn’t concerned with the moment your heart stops beating. He was after something more existential: the idea that our relationship to death—specifically, our awareness of it—is what allows us to live authentically. He called this orientation Being-towards-death. And for me, as an artist working at the intersection of mortality and meaning, that phrase really connected with me.

It’s not a call to be morbid. It’s not about dwelling in despair. Being-towards-death is about lucidity. It’s about seeing clearly that life is short, that it ends, and that this fact—when we allow ourselves to face it—can shape how we live, what we create, and how we treat each other.

Heidegger said that most of us live in what he called “everydayness.” We defer death. We keep it abstract. It happens to other people, over there, someday. But not now. Not to me. That denial, he argued, keeps us anesthetized. It keeps us disconnected from our own agency and freedom. We live borrowed lives, following borrowed scripts. I’ve talked and written about this a lot.

But when death stops being a distant rumor and becomes a personal horizon, everything shifts. We’re thrown back onto ourselves. We’re forced to ask: What really matters? What am I doing with the time I have?

That’s the ground of authenticity.

And that’s where art comes in.

I believe artists—at least the ones doing honest work—are already living in that space. Whether we’re aware of it or not, creativity pulls us toward the edge of things. Toward memory, toward loss, toward impermanence. Every meaningful work of art is a kind of death ritual. It involves sacrifice. Vulnerability. A confrontation with what’s been lost—or what will be. To make anything real, you have to give something up. You have to face what can’t be controlled. That’s mortality talking.

But there’s more. This isn’t just a personal or creative stance—it’s an ethical one.

If I’m truly aware of death—my own and yours—it becomes harder to objectify, to other, to harm. I start to recognize that we’re all temporary. All finite. And maybe, if I’m paying attention, I start to live with more urgency, more care, more attention to what matters and less to what doesn’t. Death becomes a mirror—and sometimes, a compass.

So no, Being-towards-death isn’t a philosophical abstraction for me. It’s a way of living. A way of creating. A refusal to go numb. A refusal to let denial have the last word. It’s not about having answers. It’s about not looking away.

And that’s where I think the work begins.

What do you think? Is any of this landing for you?

What Art Knows About Death That We Don’t Say Out Loud

Reflections on Oscar M. Maina’s “Exploring the Motifs of Death and Immortality” (download it here)

There’s something art knows that most of us don’t say out loud—something that sits just beneath the surface of brush strokes, plates, metaphors, burial songs, and myths. It’s this: we’re terrified of death, and we make things to outlive us.

Oscar Maina’s essay, Exploring the Motifs of Death and Immortality, is a thoughtful dive into how human beings wrestle with mortality through the creative act. It echoes the very heart of what Ernest Becker wrote in The Denial of Death—that the human animal is the only creature conscious of its inevitable end, and that this awareness generates a kind of terror we spend our lives trying to manage. Art becomes one of our most powerful buffers. A symbolic immortality project.

Maina moves across cultures—African myths, biblical stories, Egyptian rituals, and metaphysical poetry—all circling the same truth: death is the great interruption. And art is how we respond. It’s how we push back. It’s how we say, “Not yet.”

Otto Rank called it the artist’s neurosis—this compulsive need to create something lasting in the face of impermanence. For Rank, the artist doesn’t deny death through passive illusion like the rest of society. The artist confronts it head-on, wrestles with it, transforms it. Creation becomes an act of rebellion against disappearance.

Maina gives us examples: the Egyptian pharaoh buried with engraved scrolls, the Igbo requiring a second burial to grant the dead spiritual legitimacy, Donne and Thomas pushing back against the quiet acceptance of death, and African names passed to children as reincarnations of those lost. Whether through myth, poetry, ritual, or narrative, we’re always reaching for permanence.

And underneath it all is this longing—to be remembered, to mean something. We preserve stories, carve stone, paint skin, and etch memory onto glass and paper. Not because we’re vain. Because we’re aware. We know we’re here for a moment, and the work becomes a lifeline.

Maina suggests that art and mortality are in a symbiotic relationship: we give art our fear, and it gives us back meaning. We mourn through it, remember through it, rage and reflect through it. And in return, it carries something of us forward. I connect with these ideas deeply.

Becker believed that human civilization itself is a structure of death denial. But in that denial, especially in the creative act, there’s also courage. Rank saw the artist as someone who stands between two worlds: fully aware of death, and still choosing to create. Not to escape reality, but to engage with it more deeply.

Maybe that’s what art knows. That we’re dying. And that creation—real creation—isn’t about avoiding that truth. It’s about transforming it. About staring into the void and answering back.

So if you’ve ever felt that need to make something—something lasting—it’s not self-indulgence. It’s survival. It’s legacy. It’s your own quiet defiance.

And maybe, that’s enough. What do you think?