Anxiety From Fear of Death
Continuing our series discussing the sources of anxiety now brings us to exploring existential anxiety. Existential anxiety refers to the anxiety due to conscious or subconscious interaction with fears that are common to all humanity. For the purpose of our discussion, I’ll utilize the existential categories delineated by one of my heroes of the field: Irvin Yalom. According to Yalom, the fount of most anxiety is generated by encounters with the following four existential categories: Death, Freedom, Isolation, and Meaninglessness. On the front end of things, let me just state that you will never conquer existential anxiety completely, but by intentionally contemplating these primal fears you may be able to cohabitate with them more comfortably and find ways to use them to fuel your growth into a more satisfying life. In these next few blog posts, I’ll be describing these four categories in greater depth, from time to time illustrating them with some of my own experiences to provide examples..
To start, let’s tackle death which in Yalom’s view is the king of the four existential crises. We encounter existential fears of death when we face injuries, near death experiences, illness, grief or age related declines. While we all know cognitively that someday our body will decay and die, there’s a certain flavor of terror that intrudes for all of us when we see signs of it coming in our lives and most people instinctively shy away from consciously grappling with this terror. Instead we opt for distraction or fables of eternal youth, fed by media worship of celebrities with wrinkles airbrushed out, hair dyed and plastic surgery hiding other age related changes to their bodies. When people in our lives get old, we usually silo them off from the rest of the world in long term care facilities or old folks homes where only the most dedicated family members keep tabs on them. Even the way that we eat disconnects us from the death inherent in our process of farming or gardening. Our meat comes on sterile styrofoam trays wrapped in cellophane with very little sensory cues that once it was a living breathing creature.
For me my first experience of death anxiety occurred when I got my truck stuck in a snowbank in Fairbanks AK, miles down a road that nobody was likely to be driving on soon. It was night. It was also 40 below zero. It was far enough into my adulthood that I no longer had my adolescent delusions of invincibility working for me. In that moment when I contemplated my options for survival I had this realization that I could die if I wasn’t careful. And for some reason that moment was profound in a way that I have trouble describing. The closest I can come to describing is that it was sort of like waking up to find out that I had been building my house over a sinkhole that could swallow me up any minute. I had this new awareness that life was fleeting, fragile and yet somehow also precious. Suffice to say, I survived this situation. I jogged several miles in jeans and a jacket to where I had cell service and could call for help. Had I been unable to do that, I would have succumbed to the elements as I wasn’t prepared for those temperatures.
This experience rocked me for a while on a few different levels. As a person of faith, I had to grapple with how to reconcile my belief in a benevolent and loving God with my newly awakened awareness that I would experience a physical death. I took a season to really kick the tires on my belief structure to see if I truly felt that it was worth trusting, or if it was wishful thinking. This experience also awakened me to the fact that I was profoundly lonely in my life at this time. It’s hard to pull one existential thread without tugging on another at the same time, but I was single, grinding my way through an undergraduate degree and in this moment I had a renewed realization that I didn’t want to live life alone forever. Ultimately by experiencing these realizations, I was able to redirect my life towards more meaningful ways of living.
The bad news is that there is no way out of physical death. Being born is unfortunately a fatal condition. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust, we are all going to have to take that journey eventually. You can’t change the fact that the abyss yawns nearby and ignoring it’s presence is only going to generate more anxiety. The developmental task when experiencing an existential crisis is to find a way to embrace the sense of urgency, channeling it to fuel efforts to live life in accordance with your goals and values. Stories of people that embrace life changing action after a near death experience are myriad. Our time on earth is both precious and limited and death may just be one of the only things out there powerful enough to remind us to live as fully as possibly.
As you read over this blog post, does it call to mind any reminiscences of near death experiences? If you were to die tomorrow, would you have any regrets about the way that you’ve been living your life?
