In this episode of The Creative Mind & Mortality—Season 1: Glass Bones, Episode 5, Why Awareness Alone Wasn’t Enough, I open Chapter Two with the song “Walking in Your Footsteps” by The Police, a strange and unsettling reflection on extinction, impermanence, and the illusion that the present moment somehow is ours.
I talk about listening to this song years ago while driving through the desert in the middle of the night during my time in the Army and how the idea of extinction feels different when you’re alone in the dark with nothing but time and your thoughts.
From there, the episode moves into one of the central problems of human consciousness: the fact that awareness of death, by itself, is not something a species can live with.
Drawing on the work of Ernest Becker, Terror Management Theory, and the Mortality-Over-Reality Transition (M.O.R.T.) hypothesis proposed by Ajit Varki and Danny Brower, I explore the idea that the same cognitive leap that gave humans imagination and intelligence also exposed us to the unbearable knowledge that we will die.
If that awareness had arrived without some kind of psychological buffer, the species may not have survived. What evolved alongside intelligence was the ability to know and not fully feel at the same time—a built-in form of denial that made consciousness functional. Culture, ritual, religion, and art came later, not as luxuries, but as extensions of that same survival mechanism.
I also talk about what this concept means for artists and makers. Creative work is often described as a confrontation with mortality, but it may also be a way of regulating it—a controlled encounter with impermanence that lets us get close to the truth without being overwhelmed by it.
This episode continues the exploration of Glass Bones: Art, Mortality, and the Human Mind, part of my doctoral research on creativity, death anxiety, and the origins of meaning.