In this episode of The Creative Mind & Mortality—Season 1: Glass Bones, Episode 6—I explore Chapter 3 of the book, The Beginning of Denial, and the moment in human evolution when awareness of death forced the mind to develop ways to survive its own knowledge.
Opening with the song Hold On by Alabama Shakes, this episode looks at the tension between knowing life is fragile and still needing to keep going anyway. That tension may be one of the oldest human experiences. Once early humans became aware of their mortality, they could not live with that awareness at full intensity all the time. Something had to regulate it.
Drawing on Ernest Becker, Terror Management Theory, and evolutionary psychology, this episode examines the shift from neurological denial—the mind’s built-in dimmer switch that softens existential terror—to cultural denial, the symbolic systems humans created to make life feel meaningful in the face of death.
Ritual, language, identity, myth, religion, and culture itself may all have begun as ways to metabolize the rupture caused by the realization that we will die. These structures do not eliminate mortality, but they allow us to live without being overwhelmed by it.
This episode looks at how denial did not begin as a lie, but as regulation — and how that regulation eventually became the foundation of human culture.
This series is part of my ongoing work on creativity, death anxiety, and the psychology of meaning, inspired by Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death and my book project Glass Bones: Art, Mortality, and the Human Mind.