By the way, results like these aren’t limited to Germany. Similar tendencies have been demonstrated in France, India, Italy, Japan, Spain, the United States, and other countries. It’s not about being German; it’s about being human. It’s also important to note that all of this seems to occur unconsciously and automatically, so most of the research participants probably weren’t aware they were showing this tendency.
Because these death-denying defenses are unconscious, you may find yourself doubting they’re real. It all sounds pretty fanciful. But ask yourself: even after reading the words foretelling your own personal doom in the last few pages, why are you not overwhelmed by terror right now?
We avoid the terror of our demise in another interesting way, says a man who knows a thing or two about the fear of death. Film director John Carpenter says we play with it.
With his vivid white hair and a stare that suggests he can peer into our hearts to find our deepest terrors, Carpenter has creatively birthed some of our most iconic bringers of death, from Halloween’s mass-murdering psychopath, Michael Myers, to The Thing’s alien shape-shifter. After directing and producing horror films for more than thirty years, he’s noticed a kind of paradox.
“We fear death and yet we love to let it entertain us,” Carpenter says, and suggests some clear reasons for this. “It’s therapeutic. The one thing we fear more than death is thinking about death. So, instead, we think about death while we’re safely removed from it. We’ve always used modern myths and stories to explain the world. Monsters are an interesting creation. They’re very ancient. In these stories, death is several things at once: the other, the beast, and the creature, the us. All of these myths and stories that we pass around help us deal with and understand it.”
He makes an interesting point. Have you ever noticed that after a big scream, theatergoers laugh? These forms of entertainment allow us to fool ourselves into thinking death is something safe and they distance us from our own mortality. This may be related to a mechanism that psychologists call, simply, nervous laughter, which happens when we encounter stress. Physician Alex Lickerman of the University of Chicago submits that nervous laughter is a defense mechanism that guards against overwhelming anxiety. “Being able to laugh at a trauma at the moment it occurs, or soon after, signals both to ourselves and others that we believe in our ability to endure it (which is perhaps what makes laughter such a universally pleasurable experience: it makes us feel that everything will be all right),” he writes in Psychology Today.
We may laugh because it gives us a sort of symbolic control over death. “Films, especially horror films, invite us to invest in the story by asking us to project ourselves onto the screen,” says John Carpenter. “But we, the viewers, always come back to our seats alive. We’ve beaten death. For most of us, death remains an abstraction.”
As long as we keep death an abstraction, we can go about confidently living our lives as though we have all the time in the world to chase opportunity, something Paul Watkins had counted on throughout his youth.
Thinking back on his late teens, Paul Watkins recalls wanting to do something meaningful with his life. What this meant, exactly, remained elusive. His interests were numerous and somewhat generic. He considered a life in academia, in management, in something entrepreneurial. At Tulane University he floated the idea of majoring in history, business administration, and public health before landing on a broad liberal arts degree. It was “essentially as noncommittal as you could get,” Paul says.
These career changes were what his friend, a pilot named David Charlebois, might call midflight course corrections. Paul would spend years studying for one career, then change his mind completely. He earned four degrees. He even flirted with the idea of becoming a priest. In fact, he took religious vows. But doubts weighed on him. An entire life surrendered to God sounded noble, but it just seemed to require too many sacrifices.
So, in 1993, Paul headed to the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. Over dinner one night, he found himself examining a box of jambalaya mix. “I said to myself, these guys could use some marketing help!” The next day, he called an 800 number on the box and reached the corporate headquarters of Louisiana Gourmet Enterprises Inc. Before he knew it, he had a summer internship. In corporate culture, value was measured in terms of accomplishment and promotion. There was a straightforward path to success. Paul thrived in this environment. The internship eventually became a full-time job. Within one year, the company promoted him to vice president of marketing.
Paul opened a bank account and could now afford his own apartment. He watched with awe as opportunities expanded before him. His responsibilities grew beyond marketing and extended into distribution and manufacturing. Meanwhile, he was learning everything he could about running factories, managing technologies, and overseeing operations. His savings account grew from a few hundred dollars to a couple of thousand. Then to ten thousand dollars. Then twenty thousand.
Louisiana Gourmet Enterprises Inc. was a relatively small company, and when Paul was made CEO in his mid-thirties, he knew his growth opportunities had just about capped out. He began fantasizing about running his own food business. He initially thought it was too ambitious an idea for a young man right out of business school to take on. Then again, he thought, why not try?
Paul resigned from Louisiana Gourmet Enterprises in late 1996, and took the small amount of capital he’d saved to found Boudreaux’s Foods. “The name was purely a marketing decision. I chose it because it’s the most common Cajun surname I could think of at the time,” he says. “I only had three products: shrimp and crab gumbo, shrimp étouffée, and shrimp Creole. I was nervous. I wasn’t sure what I was doing, but I had a good head on my shoulders.” His doubts disappeared when he calculated his first-year revenue at a half million dollars. “But if I was going to ever make real money, I needed more products. I made a resolution to scale up the next year. I started looking for opportunities to expand.”
He didn’t have to go far. He was wandering the grocery store aisles one day, admiring his products on the shelves, when he came across a small self-published diet book called Sugar Busters. The authors were a group of local medical doctors and a businessman. Paul approached them with an offer to develop, market, and sell a whole line of food products under a licensing arrangement and to bring them on as partners, to which they agreed.
Years passed. Paul went from producing just three products to producing forty-seven—everything from mayonnaise and salad dressings, to bread, sports drinks, and pastas. He was happy, rich, and successful. Paul Watkins had everything that, externally at least, should have made him happy.
Although each of us is unique, we all exist in cultural contexts that tell us what’s valuable. Pervasive messages that come across our television and computer screens, through our radio speakers, and on roadside billboards convey very clearly what is valued—the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, the status of our jobs, the size of our homes and of our waistlines. Even those of us who actively resist such messages can’t help but feel, on some level, that these external trappings measure our value. There is no dearth of people who, in fact, judge us in this way. Of course, all these trappings cost money.
In his book Escape from Evil, the great cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker writes that money “buys bodyguards, bullet-proof glass, and better medical care. Most of all it can be passed on, and so radiates its powers even after death, giving one a semblance of immortality.” Money is one of the most obvious external measures of how we live up to our culture’s standards. According to terror management theorists Solomon, Pyszczynski, and Greenberg, the accumulation of wealth should thus serve a key role in distracting and protecting us from the fear of our impending death.
If this sounds fanciful, consider the message that President George W. Bush delivered after the events of September 11, 2001, perhaps the American people’s most significant reminder of their fragile mortality since the nation’s founding.
You might expect the president to urge people to care for one another, for their families and neighbors, and to keep faith in their government and the power of justice. Without an understanding of terror management theory, however, you might have found it surprising that he urged Americans to shop. “We cannot let the terrorists achieve the objective of frightening our nation to the point where we don’t do business, where people don’t shop,” President Bush urged. “Mrs. Bush and I want to encourage Americans to go out shopping.” And that’s exactly what Americans did during the next three months. The U.S. Commerce Department reported an increase in consumer spending of more than 6 percent from October to December of 2001, the strongest pace in four years.
Research by psychologists Tim Kasser of Knox College and Kennon Sheldon of the University of Missouri provides data supporting these observations. The researchers asked college students to imagine what their financial standing would be in fifteen years, including their salary; the value of their homes, cars, and investments; and the amount of money they would spend on entertainment, leisure activities, and clothing. But before they answered these questions, they asked half the participants to ponder their mortality by writing a paragraph or two about their thoughts and feelings regarding their deaths. By now you shouldn’t be surprised to hear that the students who wrote about their deaths said they planned to be worth more financially and spend more money on luxury items than did those who hadn’t pondered their mortality.
Although none of these students knew it, they may have been using expectations of their material wealth to defend against the unpleasant emotions generated by writing about their mortality. The unconscious logic goes something like “If I’m rich, I don’t have to worry about it.” It’s comforting and distracting to think about one’s material wealth and future status, and this may have served to reassure these students that there was no danger of their dying—at least not for a very long time.
Viewed through this lens, financial success such as that Paul Watkins experienced during much of his life exerts a powerful draw upon people because it allows us to feel special, as if we’re going to live forever. But such fragile logic may have limits, particularly when we are reminded of death in a way that defies all our mechanisms of denial and defense. Ultimately, death isn’t a two-paragraph essay; nor is it a television report of tragedy at a distance—even when that tragedy is as terrible as 9/11. Sometimes death strikes much closer to home.
On a Tuesday morning in September of 2001, Paul was startled awake by a phone call. His head felt heavy, his body sluggish, as he answered the phone. “Paul, turn on the TV,” boomed the voice of his office manager.
He stumbled out of bed and rubbed his eyes. “Which channel?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Like the rest of the world, Paul tuned into an alien scene of the familiar New York City skyline obscured by dense black smoke and of the Pentagon burning in Arlington, Virginia. “People kept talking about airplanes being taken over by hijackers. Everyone was talking about the passengers and the people in the buildings. Suddenly I was thinking about the pilots.”
Not just any pilot, but a friend of his. Paul had last seen David Charlebois that past July, at a house a short bike ride from Rehoboth Beach in Delaware. David was a neat and entertaining guy a few years younger than Paul. He and Paul got together with their mutual friends whenever Paul was out east on a business trip and David wasn’t flying for American Airlines. That July evening, David had talked about a scrappy little dog he’d recently adopted named Chance.
“There were thousands of pilots in the air on 9/11. The odds were really small that David was on one of the hijacked planes,” Paul says. But when he tried David’s cell phone, it went straight to voice mail. Paul was worried. A couple of hours later, his phone rang.
It was a mutual friend, and his tone of voice said it all. Paul’s heart sank.
David was the first officer on American Airlines Flight 77. At 9:37 that morning, it had slammed into the western side of the Pentagon.
The house on Marigny Street in New Orleans reminded Candy Chang of death. Its darkened windows were busted out. The blue-tinged wood siding was peeling. Inside the house, the rafters were exposed like bones. To keep out squatters, the sides had been completely boarded up, making people inside feel as if they were encased in a coffin.
The district had seen its share of decline since the floods of Hurricane Katrina, but it was coming back with a resurgence of music venues, lively restaurants, and a wave of new artists such as Candy Chang, who had moved into the neighborhood of narrow shotgun houses in 2010. She’d discovered the eccentricities of the community: the man blowing a trumpet on a street corner, the neighbor building a mystery space machine on another. “It feels like it was drawn by a five-year-old, in the very best way,” Candy says.
Chang, a young Taiwanese American designer and urban planner, was working in Finland when she learned that a close friend and mentor of hers had died unexpectedly. “It made me think about what’s really important to me in my life,” she says. “Death is something we’re often discouraged to talk about or even think about: ‘Don’t go there. It’s too sad. You don’t need to think about it until you’re older.’ Maybe that’s why it took me so long to lean into those thoughts, but when I finally did, I found a deep comfort and clarity I didn’t expect.”
Not long after her friend’s death, she followed an unrealized dream and moved to New Orleans, home of some of the most beautiful houses and buildings she’d ever seen. But it also had one of the highest numbers of abandoned properties in America. Candy lived about a mile from the most dilapidated house in the neighborhood. “It looked like something out of a horror movie,” she remembers.
Like director John Carpenter, Candy saw an opportunity to play with death. One February morning, she pulled on a sweater and jeans, bought a big cup of coffee from a local café, and crossed town, fully prepared to do something bold. At Burgundy Street, she stopped at a corner and gazed at the abandoned, orange-roofed house with determination. Four friends were waiting for her there with buckets of black chalkboard paint, paint rollers, brushes, a stencil, metal chalk holders, and gloves. Together, they laid some butcher paper and trash bags along the sidewalk to form a tarp. The chilled morning air was warming quickly as they started painting the side of the house with primer. An old man on a bicycle stopped and chatted with Candy about the history of the block. People walking their dogs paused to ask what they were doing. The head of the neighborhood association’s anti-blight committee brought Candy and her friends a platter of tea and cookies. A guy in a pirate suit on his way to work at a pirate-themed bar in the French Quarter wandered over and told them some jokes. It was for many just another day in the neighborhood. But not for Candy.
When the primer was dry, she rolled blackboard paint along the entire side of the boarded-up house. At the top, she used stencils to paint in large, bold white letters the words “Before I Die . . .” and beneath that, in much smaller letters, she stenciled the simple phrase “Before I die, I want to _____,” roughly eighty times. At one end of the wall, she left a little tray of blue, white, and canary yellow chalk.
“The idea came to me because I felt public spaces are our shared spaces, and they have the power to snap us out of our routines and restore our profound appreciation of what it means to be alive,” says Candy.
Before she had even packed up her supplies, people walking by asked if they could write on the wall. A man wrote, “Before I die I want to see my daughter graduate.” A couple wrote, “Before I die I want to finish school” and “Before I die I want to go 200 mph.” The guy in the pirate outfit wrote, “Before I die I want to be tried for piracy.”
Candy didn’t know what effect her art project would ultimately have on people. She hoped it would at least make some people stop and think about how short and precious life was. But the street didn’t have that much foot traffic. It was more likely that her work would just get spray-painted over by gan
gs that night.
So Candy was blown away the next morning to see that all eighty lines had been filled in, with responses spilling into the margins. The messages were thoughtful, funny, poetic, and even heartbreaking. Before I die I want to . . . “sing for millions” . . . “hold her one more time” . . . “see my daughter graduate” . . . “abandon all insecurities” . . . “plant a tree” . . . “straddle the International Date Line” . . . “get clean” . . . “live off the grid” . . . “build a school” . . . “be completely myself” . . .
Chang erased that day’s chalk contributions only to find the wall repopulated a day later. She posted a few photos of the wall online, and they went viral. Her in-box filled up with earnest messages from students, widowers, business owners, activists, neighborhood leaders, and friends—all who wanted to make a wall in their communities. Today more than a hundred “Before I Die” walls have been created in more than ten languages and twenty-five countries, including Argentina, China, Denmark, Italy, Kazakhstan, Portugal, and South Africa.
Chang’s exploration of death had tapped a nerve. For the millions who survive a trauma in their lifetime, the writing’s on the wall: life is short. A near-death experience or, in Chang’s case, the sudden, unexpected death of a loved one has a particular way of bringing that message home.
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