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.