To Buffer or Not to Buffer?

Why Not Just Buffer?

Buffering is the psychological and cultural process that regulates our awareness of death, embedding it within beliefs, identities, and meanings that make it tolerable enough to live and function. Most of us do this constantly, automatically, and without knowing it. The question worth sitting with is not whether buffering happens, but what it costs, and whether there is anything worth preserving on the other side of it.

Why not simply buffer and numb out to the reality of mortality? If it keeps us functional, stable, even relatively content, why not leave it in place?

One answer is pragmatic: in many cases, we probably do need some degree of numbing. Becker, Zapffe, and the Terror Management theorists who followed them are fairly clear on this. Zapffe, the Norwegian philosopher whose work predates and in some ways anticipates Becker's, argued that human consciousness is biologically overbuilt for survival. In "The Last Messiah" (1933), he wrote that we are the only creatures who can foresee our own deaths, and that this foresight is not a gift but a burden we spend most of our lives managing through what he called anchoring: attaching ourselves to fixed values, identities, and purposes that hold the abyss at a manageable distance. A fully unfiltered awareness of mortality is not something most people can sustain without consequence. The real question, then, is not whether buffering exists, but how much of it we rely on, and at what cost.

The argument for remaining conscious, at least intermittently, has less to do with moral superiority and more to do with what becomes available when the buffer loosens. When mortality is not fully suppressed, certain patterns become visible: the contingency of one's worldview, the constructed nature of identity, the fragility of meaning. That recognition can be destabilizing, but it can also open a different kind of responsiveness.

From one angle, this is about accuracy. You see more of what is actually structuring your experience rather than mistaking the structure for reality itself. That doesn't dissolve the structure, but it introduces a degree of reflexivity. You are not only inside it; you are also aware of being inside it.

From another angle, it shifts the register of creative work. If anxiety is only buffered, it tends to get displaced into symbolic systems that reinforce the existing worldview. If it is metabolized, even partially, it can move through the work differently, less as defense and more as material. That is where the distinction between buffering and processing becomes meaningful. It is not that one eliminates anxiety while the other doesn't. It is that one reorganizes how anxiety circulates. Rank made a related observation in Art and Artist (1932), arguing that the creative act is never simply a resolution of anxiety but a repeated negotiation with it, one that can either fortify the existing character structure or, in rarer cases, begin to transform it.

There is also an ethical dimension, and it is sharper than it might first appear. In Escape from Evil (1975), Becker argues that the same defensive structures which protect the individual from death anxiety can, under pressure, harden into aggression toward those who embody a different answer to the problem of mortality. We don't buffer privately alone; we buffer collectively, and we tend to protect those buffers by marginalizing or harming whoever threatens them. Greater consciousness doesn't automatically dissolve this dynamic, but it does make it harder to participate in unconsciously. You begin to see the mechanism, and seeing it introduces at least the possibility of refusal.

At the same time, there is no guarantee of relief or clarity. In some cases, increased awareness simply intensifies the tension. That is why many traditions, philosophical and religious alike, have treated this not as something to be exposed but contained. The Stoics practiced memento mori as a disciplined, bounded form of mortality awareness, not an invitation to sustained exposure (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, c. 161–180 CE). The point was regulation, not immersion.

What Does a Fully Unbuffered Life Actually Suffer?

If you take the idea seriously, "fully unbuffered" is not just more awareness. It is a qualitative shift in how experience is organized.

At the psychological level, the first consequence is overwhelm, not in a vague sense but something closer to what Becker describes in The Denial of Death (1973) as the terror that symbolic systems exist to manage. Without the usual filters, mortality is no longer abstract or deferred. It becomes immediate, pervasive, and difficult to bracket. The ordinary scaffolding that keeps experience coherent begins to loosen, and what follows can register as acute anxiety or panic.

Cognitively, meaning itself begins to destabilize. If cultural narratives, identities, and purposes are seen through completely, they may lose their binding force, not because they are simply false but because their constructed nature is no longer hidden. The risk is not just doubt. It is a kind of flattening, where distinctions between what matters and what doesn't become harder to sustain. That can slide toward nihilism or toward a collapse of motivational structure. Yalom describes something like this in Existential Psychotherapy (1980), noting that confrontations with mortality, when uncontained, can produce not liberation but a disorienting loss of the ordinary purposes that structure daily life.

Functionally, this matters. Action depends on a certain degree of selective blindness. You go to work, make plans, take risks, invest in relationships, all under conditions where death is backgrounded. If it moves fully into the foreground, it can interrupt those processes. Why build, strive, or commit if the endpoint is not just known but constantly present? Some people might still act, but the basis for action shifts, and often weakens.

There is also a social cost. Shared worldviews are not only individual defenses; they are collective agreements, what TMT researchers Greenberg, Pyszczynski, and Solomon (1986) describe as culturally constructed realities that function precisely because their members treat them as given rather than chosen. When one person steps too far outside them, communication strains. You begin to see the rules of the game while others are still playing it as if it were simply the world. That produces a particular kind of isolation, not dramatic, not always chosen, but persistent.

At the extreme, what full unbuffering describes starts to resemble states that clinical psychology would classify as pathological: severe anxiety disorders, depersonalization, certain forms of existential depression. That does not mean the perception is wrong. But it does suggest that the human system is not built to sustain that level of exposure continuously.

Which is why the metaphor of a dimmer switch is more useful than an on/off toggle. It implies regulation rather than elimination, a system that allows glimpses, moments where the structure thins and something more fundamental shows through, before reconstituting itself so that life can continue. The question is not how to remove the buffer entirely. It is how to move along that spectrum without collapsing; how to see more, at intervals, and still remain capable of living, acting, and making. That is the territory this work tries to stay inside, not because it is comfortable, but because it is honest, and because something that might be called clarity, or at least a less mediated relationship to being alive, waits on the other side of looking.

References
Aurelius, M. (2002). Meditations (G. Hays, Trans.). Modern Library. (Original work written c. 161–180 CE)

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

Becker, E. (1975). Escape from evil. 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.

Rank, O. (1932). Art and artist: Creative urge and personality development (C. F. Atkinson, Trans.). Alfred A. Knopf.

Yalom, I. D. (1980). Existential psychotherapy. Basic Books.

Zapffe, P. W. (1933). The last messiah (G. R. Tangenes, Trans.). Philosophy Now, 45, 21–24. (Original work published 1933)

When Death Isn’t Just Biology

What are humans afraid of? Death, meaninglessness, loneliness (isolation), and freedom. Ernest Becker and Jean-Paul Sartre made that abundantly clear.

We prefer to act as though death is easy. Vital signs, brain scans, organ failure—we turn it over to the biologists. We say, "This is where life ends," and draw a clear line. In actuality, however, human death does not exist in the sterile realm of checklists and charts. It inhabits the world of stories and symbols.

We are frightened by more than just the body shutting down. It is the breakdown of a life dominated by others. We are held to our flimsy promises of immortality by the cutting of ties. Few people knew this better than Ernest Becker. He observed that we create our morals, our art, and our cultures as defenses against the inevitable death. We try our hardest to hide that terrible reality and to act as though our existence is more than a passing biological fad.

It is possible to declare a body on a ventilator brain-dead. It's done biologically. However, to the living, it can still be a person, a narrative, or a strand in the web we weave to keep the abyss at bay. This is painfully evident from the paper I just read: human death is always relational, moral, legal, and practical. It is more than a simple off/on switch. It marks the end of a "life-form," a life molded by ritual, language, memory, and the vows we make to one another.

There is more than just flesh left over after a death. The tangle of obligations, relationships, and rights that keeps the deceased in our world a little while longer is all that is left. Even if they only endure as long as the memory does, they continue to firmly ground us in our denial and our attempt at symbolic immortality.

The moment when our symbolic world finally breaks and we realize that all of our illusions and buffers can only last so long may be the true threshold that we fear, rather than the boundary between flatline and heartbeat.

“The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man.”
— Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

What do you see holding your fear of death at bay? Do you lean on something? Or are you in a free-fall state of neuroticism? Afraid of both life and death?

You're Neurotic: How Neurotic Are You?

There’s no question—you’re neurotic. We all are, at least to some degree. It's a spectrum; the real question is, how neurotic are you?

If you’re a creative type, odds are you lean a little heavier on that scale than most. Artists tend to feel things more deeply—they’re more sensitive to emotional undercurrents, more affected by loss, conflict, absurdity, and even silence. That kind of heightened awareness can become a burden. And for many, it leads to withdrawal. You’re not interested in small talk or cocktail parties. You’d rather sit with the ache of things than skim the surface.

If you’re reading this and thinking, “Yeah, that’s me,” that’s not a flaw. It’s just a truth. But here’s the catch—if you don’t have some kind of creative outlet, some way to metabolize that existential weight, life can get pretty dark. Neuroticism without expression is a slow bleed. Creativity is what keeps it from turning into despair.

My work is centered around how artists manage neuroticism, especially the mainspring of it—the fear of not existing anymore. It’s the implications of death that concern us, not really death itself (although for some, the death part is a big deal). What are the implications? The question revolves around meaning and significance. Was my life meaningful? Did I matter? Have I made any difference? Will I be remembered?

These aren’t casual questions. They sit under the surface of everything we do. For artists, they show up in the studio, in the darkroom, in the act of making. The work becomes a kind of wrestling match with invisibility. We create not just to be seen, but to prove—to ourselves, maybe more than anyone else—that we were here. That this inner world we carry meant something.

I believe creative work is one of the few ways to confront the void without collapsing into it. It gives form to the formless, voice to the silence. It’s not therapy, exactly—but it is a kind of existential hygiene. A way of making peace, if not with death itself, then with the tremors it sends through a conscious life.

“Rank asked why the artist so often avoids clinical neurosis when he is so much a candidate for it because of his vivid imagination, his openness to the finest and broadest aspects of experience, his isolation from the cultural worldview that satisfies everyone else. The answer is that he takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it, he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the work of art. The neurotic is precisely the one who cannot create—the “artiste-manque,” as Rank so aptly called him. We might say that both the artist and the neurotic bite off more than they can chew, but the artist spews it back out again and chews it over in an objectified way, as an ex­ternal, active work project. The neurotic can’t marshal this creative response embodied in a specific work, and so he chokes on his in­troversions. The artist has similar large-scale introversions, but he uses them as material.” Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

The main point of my book is about this. It’s about my personal experience as an artist and how that has affected my relationship with death. There is no doubt artists cope with death anxiety in a different way. The problem is how neurotic they are, how extreme they are when it comes to their inability to deal with existential problems. The non-creative person, or as Rank called them, the artiste manqué, has no chance to resolve their issues through an external process. You can witness this every day in the world. Creative types have a chance to transform the anxiety into something interesting or beautiful. The problem is that they need to be conscious of the process for it to work well.

That’s the real paradox: the gift is there, but if you don’t realize what you’re doing—if you’re not aware that your art is a kind of transmutation of death anxiety—then the process can still collapse in on itself. You can end up consumed by the very thing you’re trying to escape. The work might get made, but it won't heal. It won’t clarify. It won’t liberate. And it definitely won’t confront mortality.

Becker, Rank, even Kierkegaard—they all understood that some kind of creative striving was essential. Not just as expression, but as salvation. But it has to be done with eyes open. That’s what I’m arguing. That consciousness is the key—not just of death, but of the internal machinery we build to cope with it. Otherwise, even the most beautiful art can become another mask. Another form of denial.