19: How Our Mortality Drives Our Lives: The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker Made You Think

“It’s this denial of death that is our main psychological challenge.”
In this episode of Made You Think, Neil and I discuss The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. It’s a phenomenal book on how our fear of mortality is the core for our psychological disturbances, our motivation for taking action in life and behaving in certain ways.
We cover a wide range of topics, including:
The necessity for a heroic purpose to motivate us and the current lack of it Why we do things and behave in certain ways The fear of death being the core of our psychological disturbances How we often take comfort in trivial things to give us the illusion of control Death being a prime motivation for us to do things and take action Breaking down our need for certainty and control in life Balancing the need to reflect with the need to experience And much more. Please enjoy, and be sure to grab a copy of The Denial of Death and to check out Nat’s Notes on the book!
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to check out our episode on The Power of Myth, to learn how to use the power of mythology to positively influence your life, and our episode on How to Think Like Elon Musk, to learn how to emulate Musk’s way of thinking for extreme advantages in life.
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Mentioned in the show:
Perfect Keto [1:42] Dr. Jordan Peterson Podcast [2:45] Carnegie Mellon [10:58] Dante’s Inferno [17:47] Blackfish [27:52] Waitbutwhy [31:15] Waitbutwhy article on the iPhone experiment [31:15] Crony Beliefs [38:12] Melting Asphalt [38:18] Atheist Reddit [44:52] Mark Manson’s website [47:27] Nomad List [50:07] RemoteOK [50:12] Hoodmaps [50:14] Modern Times Brewery [52:12] Made You Think Cryptocurrency episode [55:54] Coinbase [57:11] Nat Chat Podcast [59:12] Growth Machine [1:02:45] Quickbooks [1:03:05] Tim Ferriss Podcast [1:07:30] Idiocracy [1:21:00] Made You Think support page [1:24:08] Four Sigmatic Mushroom Coffee [1:24:20] Four Sigmatic Cordyceps Mushroom Elixir [1:25:20] Kettle and Fire Bone Broth (20% off!) [1:25:35] Instapot [1:26:17] Perfect Keto’s products [1:26:47] Books mentioned:
The Denial of Death (Nat’s Notes) The Power of Myth [4:18] (Nat’s Notes) (episode on the book) Mastery [14:27] (Nat’s Notes) (episode on the book) The Story of Philosophy [15:14] (Nat’s Notes) Black Swan [23:20] (Nat’s Notes) Godel Escher Bach [26:18] (Nat’s Notes) (episode on the book) Waking Up [26:47] (Nat’s Notes) The Way of Zen [35:20] (Neil’s Notes) (Nat’s Notes) (episode on the book) Sapiens [36:08] (Nat’s Notes) Radical [45:44] Work Clean [48:16] (Nat’s Notes) (episode on the book) The 4-Hour Workweek [48:48] Antifragile [1:11:20] (Nat’s Notes) (episode on the book) Skin in the Game [1:19:01] Brave New World [1:19:39] Fight Club [1:22:42] People mentioned:
Ernest Becker Sigmund Freud [2:10] Dr. Jordan Peterson [2:45] Carl Jung [14:38] Will Durant [15:14] Albert Einstein [16:00] Ray Kurzweil [18:23] Peter Thiel [18:29] Elon Musk [18:47] (episode on How to Think Like Elon Musk) Sam Harris [26:47] Tim Urban [32:07] Jose Ortega y Gasset [36:26] Kevin Simmler [38:14] Mark Manson [47:27] Tim Ferriss [48:44] Peter Levels [50:06] Kierkegaard [53:40] Taylor Pearson [55:52] Adil Majid [56:24] Jocko Willink [1:04:11] Erich Fromm [1:05:47] Nassim Nicholas Taleb [1:11:20] (Antifragile episode) Neil Strauss [1:18:42] (Emergency episode) 0:00 - Introductory quote and a bit of information about the book itself.
4:28 - Some thoughts on living every day as your last, versus taking everything seriously due to the impact it has in the long-term. Also, some discussion on time, various aspects of human nature, and the differences between everyone’s perspective.
8:49 - Becoming conscious of what we’re doing to earn our feeling of heroism to find out that it’s the main self-analytic problem of lif