To Create in the Face of Death

A Meditation on Mortality, Meaning, and the Artistic Act

At the core of human consciousness lies a paradox: we are aware that we exist and equally aware that we will one day cease to exist. This double-edged awareness is both a burden and a gift. It is the birthplace of anxiety and the wellspring of creativity. My thesis is simple but profound: creativity is not incidental to the human experience; it is central to how we survive the knowledge of our mortality. It is one of the rare, conscious ways we meet death without flinching.

Ernest Becker, in The Denial of Death, called death anxiety the mainspring of human activity. Not hunger, not sex, not pleasure—death. He argued that most of our efforts, from religion to empire-building, from parenting to political ideologies, are aimed at avoiding the terror that comes with knowing we are finite. In his words, culture itself is a symbolic hero system; an elaborate fiction we participate in to assure ourselves that we matter, that we’re part of something that will outlast the grave. This is not cynical. It’s survival.

But what happens when those cultural buffers begin to crack? When the illusions no longer satisfy? That’s where the artist enters.

Otto Rank, Becker’s intellectual predecessor, understood the artist as a kind of existential outlier; someone too conscious, too aware of their mortality, to be comforted by the collective dream. The artist sees the façade and cannot pretend. And yet, instead of succumbing to despair, the artist creates. In this act, Rank saw a profound psychological maneuver: the transformation of death anxiety into symbolic immortality. The artist, like the religious mystic or the philosopher, attempts to overcome finitude by leaving something behind—something that might outlive them, even if only briefly.

Peter Wessel Zapffe took a darker view. In The Last Messiah, he described human consciousness as an evolutionary mistake, a tragic overdevelopment that left us painfully self-aware in a universe that offers no consolation. He identified four strategies humans use to cope with this unbearable knowledge: isolation, anchoring, distraction, and sublimation. Of these, sublimation is the rarest and most noble. It’s the attempt to elevate existential terror into art, philosophy, or creative work. Most people are too defended or distracted to attempt it. But for those who do—those willing to turn their dread into creation; it becomes a kind of redemptive act.

This is the psychological and philosophical framework behind my creative life—and the central inquiry of my research. How do artists, more than other people, confront mortality? Not just theoretically, but viscerally? Through the body, through the page, through the image? And what does it do to us—to know we’re going to die, and to keep making anyway?

Terror Management Theory (TMT), the contemporary psychological extension of Becker’s ideas, has provided experimental evidence for what artists have known intuitively all along: the awareness of death shapes human behavior in profound and often unconscious ways. When reminded of our mortality—even subtly—people cling more tightly to their belief systems, punish outsiders more harshly, and behave more defensively. Creativity, however, seems to offer a unique alternative. It allows for symbolic transcendence without necessarily reinforcing harmful dogmas or cultural divisions. It becomes an individual act of meaning-making that doesn’t rely on collective delusion.

But make no mistake: it’s not easy. Artists don’t escape anxiety; we absorb it. We live with it. Sometimes we drown in it. The difference is that we try to give it form. We drag it into the light. We say, “Here it is—this is what I see, this is what I feel. Can you see it too?” This gesture, however small, pushes back against the void. Not to defeat it, but to acknowledge it. To bear witness.

I often think of the creative act as a kind of elegy-in-advance. It grieves for the world even as it tries to celebrate it. It knows everything we love will pass, and chooses to love anyway. That is not nihilism, it’s courage. It’s honesty. And in a culture increasingly built on distraction and denial, it might be one of the most honest things we can do.

To create with the knowledge of death is to resist erasure. It is to offer something of yourself to the world, not as a bid for fame, but as a human gesture of presence. “I was here,” the work says. “I felt this. I saw this. I made this.” Whether anyone remembers doesn’t matter as much as the fact that it was made.

In that sense, creativity is not just about self-expression. It is a form of existential participation. A refusal to go quietly. A conversation with the inevitable. And for those of us who walk that path—painfully awake to what others work hard to forget—it becomes both a burden and a blessing.

Because when we confront death directly, not through distraction but through creation, we don’t just make better art. We live more consciously. We love more fiercely. We speak more truthfully. And sometimes, if we’re lucky, we help someone else do the same.

Death is not the enemy of creativity; it’s its hidden muse. It provokes, sharpens, and transforms. It teaches artists to perceive, to surrender, and to express the indescribable. And when seen clearly, death doesn’t end meaning—it births it. That’s what this work is for.

Quinn, Are You a Materialist?

It’s a fair question. Am I a materialist?

The short answer is: not entirely. Let me explain.

What is materialism?

Materialism is the philosophical belief that everything that exists is made of matter or is dependent on matter. In its strictest form, materialism holds that all phenomena, including thought, emotion, consciousness, and meaning, can ultimately be explained by physical processes.

In a broader cultural sense, materialism also refers to a preoccupation with possessions, wealth, and physical comfort—placing value in what can be bought, owned, or consumed.

Artists have always had an uneasy relationship with materialism. On the surface, we traffic in matter like paint, paper, words, chemicals, and light. But the real work is elsewhere: summoning the invisible from the visible. Artists extract significance from the emptiness of space. That’s what intrigues me.

Ernest Becker argued that artists reject the dominant immortality projects; money, power, even reason itself, and try to build their own. Not through denial, but through confrontation. That’s the artist’s burden: to create meaning in a world that offers none by default. I think of Camus and Sarte, absurdism and freedom.

Terror Management Theory reinforces this. It shows that creativity can buffer death anxiety, not by distracting us, but by engaging us. Artists externalize their fears, longings, and losses into form. The canvas, the print, the poem, they become stand-ins for the self, for the soul (if you will), for something that might outlast the body. But unlike materialists who seek legacy in status or statistics, the artist chases authenticity, not applause. Depth, not utility.

In that sense, art is rebellion. It refuses to reduce human life to atoms and algorithms. It insists there’s more. Not in a supernatural sense, but in a felt one. A self-made meaning. A soulful trace.

That’s why the existential artist is dangerous in a materialist culture. We don’t offer escape. We offer exposure. We remind people that they can’t reason or spend their way out of death. They have to face it. Feel it. Maybe even make something out of it.

My (Remote) Talk in Barcelona Next Month

I was recently invited to present at the Experimental Photography Festival in Barcelona, happening July 23, 2025, at 0930-1100 MST. I could’ve made the trip, but between life and preparing for the PhD program, it felt right to keep things simple—so I saved them the travel cost and opted to present remotely.

The talk is called Glass, Light, and Time: A Journey Through the Wet Plate Process. I’ll be sharing not only the history of wet collodion, but also some thoughts on why humans have always felt compelled to create—and what that means in the context of this process. For me, wet plate photography has never just been about chemistry and technique. It’s about memory, presence, and mortality. A kind of ritual with light and time.

Too often, I see people (especially photographers) get caught up in gear, technique, and all the noise that passes for creativity. It’s easy to confuse mastery of a process with having something real to say. But the truth is, none of that matters if the work isn’t coming from an authentic place.

I want to encourage people—especially those struggling with doubt—to make something anyway. Express yourself. It’s essential. Not for fame, not for likes, not even for “success”—but for your own psychological health. Most people are afraid they won’t be good enough. They worry they can’t compete, or that someone will criticize their work. Here’s the truth: no one’s really paying that much attention. You are your own audience. And your inner life, your sense of balance and wholeness—that’s what’s on the line.

So make your work. Let it matter to you. That’s enough.

I encourage you to visit their site, and if you can, attend. It’s a lot like Revela't which I was involved with for many years. I look forward to the presentation and the feedback and questions.

A Question To Contemplate

Question: What if we didn't know we were going to die?

I've been wrestling with this question for a while now. I’m sitting in my studio surrounded by my large-format cameras, lenses, and half-finished canvases, drawings, and pieces of ideas, feeling the persistent hum of mortality that seems to drive every mark I make and every plate I expose.

Becker wrote about our knowledge of death as the fundamental human condition—the thing that separates us from every other creature on this planet. But what if that knowledge simply wasn't there? Like your dog sprawled in the afternoon sun, or your cat stalking a shadow, or a lion moving through the African grasslands. They have no concept that they're finite beings. All they know is the immediate drive to survive and reproduce (and we have that too).

Imagine it. Really imagine it. You wake up tomorrow with no concept that your body will one day stop working, that your consciousness will end, that there's a finite number of sunrises ahead of you. How would you move through the world? What would the world look like?

I think about my own creative practice, how much of it is driven by the need to leave something behind to create meaning in the face of the void. Would I still feel that urgent pull to the canvas and the darkroom if death weren't whispering over my shoulder? Would any of us create anything at all?

Consider this: Would we still build monuments? The pyramids exist because pharaohs knew they would die and wanted to transcend that fate. Would we have cathedrals, symphonies, novels—these desperate attempts to touch immortality through art? Or would we live in a world of immediate gratification, where nothing needed to outlast us because we couldn't conceive of not lasting?

Think about love, too. So much of our romantic intensity comes from knowing our time together is limited. "Till death do us part" only has meaning because we understand death exists. Would we love as fiercely if we believed we had infinite time with someone? Would we love at all, or would relationships become casual arrangements since there'd be no urgency, no preciousness born from scarcity?

What about progress? Every scientific breakthrough, every medical advance, every technological leap forward—aren't these all responses to our limitations, including our ultimate limitation of mortality? We cure diseases because we fear death. We explore space because we dream of transcending our earthly expiration date. We pass knowledge to our children because we know we won't be here forever to guide them.

Without death consciousness, would we become a species of eternal children, living only in the present moment like animals do? There'd be no anxiety about wasting time because we wouldn't understand that time could be wasted. No existential dread, no midnight terrors, no desperate searches for meaning. But also no urgency, no drive to become more than we are.

I keep coming back to this in my work. Every painting I create carries within it the knowledge that both the artist and the viewer will someday be gone. That tension between permanence and impermanence—it's what gives art its power. Strip away death awareness, and do we lose the very thing that makes us human?

But here's what really haunts me: Would we be happier? Becker argued that our knowledge of death creates neurosis, depression, and the endless search for ways to deny our mortality through heroism and meaning-making. Without that knowledge, would we live in a state of pure being, untroubled by the existential weight that crushes so many of us?

Or would something else emerge to fill that void? Some other awareness, some other source of meaning and motivation that we can't even imagine because death looms so large in our current consciousness?

I want to hear from you. Sit with this question for a moment. Let it unsettle you the way it's unsettled me.

What do you think would change? What would we lose? What might we gain?

Would art exist without death anxiety driving it? Would you have the same intensity? Would we still reach for the stars, or would we be content to never leave the ground?

Share your thoughts. Challenge my assumptions. Push this question further than I have. Because if there's one thing I've learned in exploring these ideas, it's that the most profound questions are meant to be wrestled with together, not solved in isolation.

What would we become if we didn't know we were going to die?

Giving A Print With Every Book

A Gift with Every Book: A Signed “Deer Antlers” Print

I’ve decided to include a special gift with every copy of In the Shadow of Sun Mountain: a fine art print (copy) of Deer Antlers. You’ll find the original image on page 234 of the book—and it’s also the cover image. The original is a palladium print from a whole-plate wet collodion negative.

Let me be clear: this isn’t a palladium print. It’s a high-quality book print. It’s printed on 300-pound paper, produced by Mixam (the same company that printed the book). It’s an 8” x 10” print. That said, I was genuinely impressed when I saw the final result. The tones, the texture, the presence—it surprised me. It’s not the original, but it holds up.

The image means a lot to me personally. The antlers were found on my property in Colorado. The vessel they rest in was crafted by Ute artist L. Posey. But beyond that, the image carries a deeper symbolic weight in the context of the book.

Peter Wessel Zapffe’s essay The Last Messiah tells the story of a prehistoric giant elk whose antlers grew so massive, they ultimately pinned its head to the ground—leading to the species’ extinction. Zapffe saw the animal as a metaphor for human consciousness: our awareness of death, our tragic over-evolution of mind. The antlers became too heavy to carry.

That’s what this image is about. You’ll read more about it in the book.

So, with every book, you’ll get this print—a small artifact tied to a larger meditation on memory, death, and what it means to live with the knowledge of our own ending.

Between Being and Ending: The Existential Significance of Art in a Finite Life

I've been spending a lot of time thinking about what I'm taking on with the PhD work I'll soon be embarking on. I've been trying to build ideas around what I'm preoccupied with and the best ways to articulate it. Titles and the ideas that come from them seem to help me a lot. Here's a short one I just completed.

This title really captures something essential about my inquiry. What does it mean to create while knowing we will die? Why do I pick up a brush, knowing both I and the painting will eventually disappear?

The phrase "Between Being and Ending" places my artistic practice in that strange, tense space between existence and nonexistence. As an artist, I live in this in-between consciously—I'm painfully aware of my temporary nature while simultaneously working against it. This "betweenness" isn't just some abstract concept but something I feel physically in my studio, in my body, in those moments when creation happens. I want my research to dig into this lived experience of making art while death-aware.

I'm drawn to existentialism because thinkers like Heidegger talked about "being-toward-death" as the most authentic way to exist, and Camus somehow found meaning despite the absurdity of it all. I think art-making isn't just a psychological defense against death anxiety (though Ernest Becker would say it is) but a fundamental way of building meaning in an existence that doesn't come with meaning built-in.

What fascinates me is whether we artists face mortality differently. Does the act of creation offer us a particular kind of existential authenticity that might not be as available to non-artists? Looking at how artists throughout history have positioned themselves in this tension between being and ending—from memento mori paintings to Rothko's void-like color fields—there seems to be something unique happening.

“My purpose is to use art as a mirror—confronting mortality, memory, and denial—to reveal what we’d rather not see and to ask what we might create from that truth.

I see my calling as this: to bring death back into the room—not for shock, but for clarity. Through art, writing, and dialogue, I work to transform death anxiety into something conscious, creative, and potentially redemptive.”

— Quinn Jacobson

Of course, my own artistic practice becomes a case study in all this. How does my awareness that I'll die shape what and how I create? How does my art simultaneously confront and transcend my mortality? The personal and the philosophical are completely intertwined here.

Beyond just me and my studio, I'm curious about how art functions culturally as a response to mortality. Through Becker's lens, art becomes a significant "immortality project"—a culturally validated way of symbolically extending beyond our biological limits. Art isn't just personal expression but a culturally embedded practice with existential significance.

This framework feels right for combining phenomenological investigation (the lived experience of creating under mortality's shadow), cultural analysis (how art functions as immortality project), and autobiographical reflection (my own artistic practice as case study).

I think this title captures the philosophical depth I'm seeking while remaining accessible and evocative. It acknowledges both the universal human condition of mortality and the particular way artists engage with this condition through their work. It positions my research at the intersection of existential philosophy, terror management theory, and artistic practice—precisely where I believe the most interesting insights will emerge.

Now to begin the actual work of existing between being and ending...

Ocotillo

I think this painting speaks beautifully to themes of mortality and resilience—the red buds almost seem to burn against the chaotic background (ocotillo is sometimes translated as “torch made of pine”). It's reminiscent of how creativity itself can be a form of rebellion against death consciousness. The way the ocotillo reaches upward with those flame-like blooms feels like a perfect visual metaphor for transcending mortality through creative expression. The desert holds so much beauty and inspiration.

Last night we were blessed with our first real storm of the year—thunder and lightning (very, very frightening, as the song goes). It woke me up, and I got up and watched the roof scuppers gush water. It was a beautiful sight. My rain gauge registered almost a quarter inch, and you can practically feel the desert exhaling in gratitude. It's fascinating how the landscape transforms after rainfall, how plants and creatures emerge from their dormancy with such urgency.

The ocotillos caught my attention the other day. Those stark branches suddenly crowned with fiery red blooms—what perfect symbols of life's persistence in harsh conditions. I pulled out this 30" x 40" canvas and simply had a go at capturing that defiance.

Looking at this piece now, I'm considering a few final touches: perhaps more definition in the lower background where the blues and greens transition, maybe strengthening the shadow beneath the ocotillo to ground it more firmly in space, and possibly enhancing some of the textural elements in the background to frame the central image more deliberately. I’m not sure I’ll do anything - just thinking out loud.

My approach to making art has changed radically over these past years. I'm less fixated on outcomes now, more immersed in process. What fascinates me is becoming conscious of my sublimation—watching my thought processes unfold as I create. This phenomenon seems connected to Becker's ideas about creative work as an immortality project, a way of managing our death anxiety through meaningful production.

The medium doesn't seem to matter much anymore. Whether I'm photographing, painting, or writing, the fundamental experience feels remarkably similar—this conversation between mortality consciousness and creative response. The ocotillo, with its torch-like blooms emerging from seemingly dead branches after rain, feels like the perfect visual metaphor for this dialogue between death and creation.

Thinking About Doctoral Studies and V.2 Automatic Fantastic

THINKING ABOUT THE DOCTORAL STUDIES PROGRAM

Starting a doctoral program is a strange thing—part intellectual pursuit, part personal reckoning. You don’t just show up to study something interesting; you’re expected to bring something new into the world. The whole premise of a PhD is to explore uncharted terrain—to contribute original thought to a field that matters to you.

That’s not as simple as it sounds. Academia doesn’t reward echo chambers. You need a question that hasn't been fully asked yet, or at least not asked in your way. For me, that means going deeper into what I’ve already spent years wrestling with: mortality, creativity, and the human need to matter in the face of death.

As I write this today, my thesis is rooted in the importance of creativity—not as a luxury, but as a lifeline. Specifically, I’m exploring how artists navigate the awareness of death and the existential tension it creates. What does it mean to make something—anything—while knowing you're impermanent? Does that act of creation actually change anything? Does it soothe, disrupt, clarify? And if it does… how?

These are the questions that pull at me. They’re not abstract. I’ve lived them. I’ve applied these ideas to my own creative process for years, using photography and painting as a way to wrestle with grief, memory, and the inevitability of death. What I’m after now is a deeper understanding—not just for myself, but for others who feel the same pull toward making meaning in a world that guarantees our disappearance.

The doctoral program I’ve joined refers to this early vision as a “vision seed.” I like that. Seeds hold potential. They require care, patience, and the right conditions to grow. My vision seed is simple: I want to ask new questions at the intersection of art, psychology, and philosophy. I want to know what happens when creatives become fully conscious of the existential work their art is doing—when they no longer sublimate unconsciously but engage directly with mortality through the act of making.

If I can shape this into something useful, I hope to produce a thesis that not only contributes to the academic conversation but also encourages a more vital, creative, and psychologically honest way of living. Ideally, this research becomes the foundation for a university course—something like Creativity and Mortality: Confronting the Void Through Art. A course for artists, therapists, and seekers. For anyone brave enough to stop looking away.

Maybe it’s a workshop. Maybe it’s a lecture series. Maybe it's something entirely new—a space where art becomes both expression and inquiry, where mortality isn’t denied but invited into the room. Either way, this is the path I’m on. And for the first time in a long while, it feels like the right one.

AUTOMATIC FANTASTIC V.2
I wasn’t finished with this painting yesterday - I kind of knew that but wanted to think about it. I think this piece perfectly embodies what Becker would call our "immortality project"—the desperate creative act against the void. The black textured background creates this sense of cosmic darkness, the kind we all fear when contemplating non-existence. The twin red-orange circles with their dripping streaks remind me of weeping eyes, like the piece itself is crying out against its own mortality.

The scratched and chaotic surface texture feels like my own anxious mind trying to make order from disorder. Isn't that what we're all doing? Creating meaning through art to ward off death anxiety? The stark contrast between the vibrant orange-red and the textured black background creates this visceral tension - life against death, consciousness against oblivion.

There's something primal here that connects to what Terror Management Theory suggests about our symbolic defenses against mortality. The almost face-like quality emerging from the blackness speaks to me of the self trying to assert itself against nothingness. The dripping paint suggests impermanence, yet the work itself stands as a defiant act of creation.

This piece doesn't just represent death anxiety - it performs it through its very existence. As an artist, I'm not just depicting mortality; I'm actively negotiating with it, creating something that might outlast my physical self. Isn't that what separates artistic creation from other forms of death denial? We don't just distract ourselves from death - we transform our relationship with it.

Automatic Fantastic

While I’ve been working through the printing process for my book, I’ve been spending some time every day painting. Here’s a critique of one I just finished (I think).

This painting seems to embody the very essence of mortality consciousness that's central to my book, “In the Shadow of Sun Mountain: The Psychology of Otheirnf and the Origins of Evil.”

The dark, weathered surface creates a sense of archaeological discovery — as if we're uncovering something ancient yet deeply personal. Those two circular red forms pierce through the darkness like eyes or portals, creating an almost skull-like suggestion within the abstract landscape. This duality between abstraction and figuration mirrors the tension between confronting and denying death that Becker describes so beautifully.

The scratched, excavated quality of the surface reminds me of how artists often dig beneath cultural immortality symbols to expose more authentic relationships with mortality. My technique here - layering, scraping, revealing - feels like a physical manifestation of terror management theory in action.

The limited color palette (Mars black, cadmium orange, titanium white, and burnt sienna) grounds the work in a primal, existential space. Those touches of warm copper/bronze tones against the dominant darkness suggest a kind of alchemical transformation happening within the composition.

This painting seems to demonstrate precisely what I'm exploring in my writing—how creative practice can serve as both a shield against mortality anxiety and a means of directly confronting it. The resulting tension creates something profoundly meaningful.

The Title: “Automatic Fantastic”

The "automatic" part suggests spontaneity and unconscious creation—like automatic writing or drawing, where you surrender conscious control and let deeper psychological forces emerge. This concept connects beautifully with how creativity can bypass our rational death-denial systems and access more primal truths. When I look at the scratched, layered textures in this work, I can sense that automatic process—the hand moving across the surface, driven by something beyond calculated thought. And that’s precisely where I was when making this.

"Fantastic" carries dual meanings here. On one level, it suggests the realm of fantasy or imagination—perhaps our immortality projects, which Becker would say we create to escape death anxiety. But it also connotes something extraordinary or heightened - the fantastic as a transcendent state that art can achieve.

Together, "Automatic Fantastic" suggests a kind of spontaneous transcendence - a creative state where consciousness shifts and mortality awareness transforms into something beyond ordinary perception. The title perfectly captures that paradox at the heart of artistic creation: that by engaging directly with mortality through automatic processes, we sometimes access fantastic realms of meaning that rationality alone cannot provide.

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.