Existential Creativity

_{This is Part 2 of a two-part series on death anxiety and the work of cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning classic “The Denial of Death.” Read Part 1 here.} 

“Art is a reverberation of an impermanent existence… Michelangelo’s David, the first cave paintings, a child’s finger-paint landscapes—they all echo the same human cry, like graffiti scrawled in a bathroom stall: I was here.”

— Rick Rubin, The Creative Act 

There are two basic facts of human existence:

• We are born.

• We die. 

What we do in between—that part is up to us. The question becomes: How should we spend our finite time here on this Earth? Once our basic survival needs have been met, what pursuits are worth devoting ourselves to? 

While there are many possible answers to these questions, humans throughout the ages seem to agree on one particular response to our existential predicament: we create. 

Arguably, what makes us uniquely human is not our intelligence (scientists have shown that many animals, and even plants, are far more intelligent than previously believed), but our awareness of our own mortality. As the psychologist Robert Greene points out, we are the only animal that is aware of our own mortality. Every creature on Earth dies; but no other creature lives with the awareness of this fact. 

The other thing that makes humans unique among species is our imagination. Creativity is a uniquely human skill set. We imagine what could be, and then take what we imagined and give it some material shape. Our ideas become form; thoughts become things; dreams become reality. 

The connection between these two basic aspects of our being may not be immediately obvious. But there is good reason to believe that our creative drive is, in fact, deeply rooted in our awareness of our own mortality. 

Knowing that we march closer each day to our own demise, we humans have chosen to spend the limited time we have building monuments in the world to stand as testaments to our tenure here. Symphonies, marble sculptures, skyscrapers, Greek tragedies, tribal masks, Gothic cathedrals: it’s all, as Rick Rubin says, a declaration of “I was here.” 

Bucking impermanence, we build our castles in the sand, knowing that they will one day be swept out with the tide. Like the violinists on the deck of the Titanic, we choose to play music, even as the ship goes down. 

“Alive to the Panic” 

Is all human creativity, on some level, a response to existential anxiety? 

Is art just a coping mechanism for dealing with the basic trauma of being mortal? 

This is something I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about. 

As a philosophy student at McGill, my two main areas of focus were existentialism and aesthetics (the philosophy of art). In retrospect, this was clearly a reflection of my own internal conviction that art and beauty was what made life worth living. I wrote my honors thesis on German Idealist philosopher G.W. Hegel’s theory that art, along with religion and philosophy, was one of the primary vehicles through which humanity achieved self-awareness, and came to know our place within the whole of existence. Through art, he theorized, we come to know ourselves as existence itself. 

In the 13 years since, I’ve continued to follow the breadcrumbs of this line of inquiry, albeit from a somewhat less lofty perspective. Much of my writing explores the inner workings of the creative mind, and considers how better understanding ourselves might help unlock our creative potential (to this end, I wrote a book on the minds of highly creative people and designed a viral creative personality test). 

More recently, my own journey through loss and work on Death Archetypes and Hello, Mortal has led me down the rabbit hole of contemplating mortality that’s brought a whole other piece of this equation into focus; one that I’ve come to see as central to unlocking our own creative potential. 

If we look to existentialist thought and the work of Ernest Becker, the cultural anthropologist renowned for his work on existential anxiety (check out our last newsletter), the answer is clear: fear of death is the fuel behind some of humanity’s crowning achievements and the greatest works of art, from the pyramids to the Guernica. 

As the existential philosopher Nietzsche put it, “Art is the supreme task and the truly metaphysical activity in this life.” 

The relationship between creativity and mortality is something we don’t often think about. But if you dig deeper into Becker’s work on the fear of death, what you will ultimately find is a celebration and affirmation of the power of human creativity. 

As we’ll see, humans create as a response to death anxiety. And according to Becker, the supreme gift of artists, poets and shamans is their to stay sensitive and aware in the face of existential terror; to remain “alive to the panic inherent in creation.” 

From Basquiat to Emily Dickinson to Leonard Cohen to Frida Kahlo, what we see in the lives of  greatest artists is precisely this capacity to stay awake to the terrifying awareness of their own mortality. Rather than avoiding or denying the reality of death—like people do—the artist, by staying aware, is able to convert this terror into raw creative energy. The awareness of mortality becomes their creative superpower. 

For anyone who seeks to live a creative life, it’s worth contemplating how we might befriend our own fear of death—and allow it to fuel our creative path.

Fear of Death: A Creative and Destructive Force  

The awareness of our mortality is a double-edged sword: it can be destructive or creative. 

Much of the time, we experience the fear of death as more of a creative block than a wellspring of inspiration. Death anxiety can permeate our lives as a chronic, low-grade fear of the unknown that prevents us from taking risks, expressing our true selves, and having the courage to live authentically. It can lead us to cling to our own narrow beliefs and worldviews, and to reject those who think differently from us. A fear of death, in other words, becomes a fear of life. 

But as we gain the courage to confront this fear, a world of new possibilities opens up. We get clear on what matters. We wake up to our deeper values. We stop wasting our time with meaningless pursuits. We find the courage and urgency to carve out our own path in life. 

Becker knew how destructive the fear of death could be, but he didn’t think we should try to rid ourselves of it. Rather than seeking to pacify our existential anxiety through medication or meditation, we suggested, instead, that we use it as creative fuel. 

According to Becker, we humans experience a natural longing to create, to contribute to the greater cosmic whole by making our own little dent in the universe. 

Becker saw this creative longing as a response to the fear of death. Humans create art, culture and other symbolic systems as “immortality projects.” We take on these projects in order to achieve a significant and lasting relationship with life—which Becker and psychologists refer to as “symbolic immortality”—that buffers against the underlying but ever-present fear of a meaningless existence. 

And it’s not just about creating art. Becker was talking about the full spectrum of human creativity, which includes not only paintings and novels and symphonies, but also the communities we build and the gardens we plant and the objects we arrange on our shelves. 

In expressing our innate creative potential, we can find a deeper meaning in our finite existence, thus warding off existential anxiety.

Becker’s grand conclusion, after a lifetime of studying the human struggle with the awareness of death, was this: 

The most that any of us can seem to do is to fashion something—an object, or ourselves—and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force.

In other words: creativity is kinda the whole point. 

The Immortality Key 

Hermann Hesse, the Nobel Prize-winning German writer, contemplated whether fear of death was the “root of all art,” writing in Narcissus and Goldmund:  

We fear death, we shudder at life's instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, as transitory and will soon disappear. When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something that lasts longer than we do.

It’s not just artists who seek to “salvage something” and live on in some way through their work. We all seek immortality, says Becker. We might have kids, accumulate wealth, or climb the corporate ladder in an attempt to give our lives some kind of enduring significance. 

These “immortality projects” can take many different forms: A tech billionaire using artificial intelligence to try to hack their way to the digital afterlife. Artisans painstakingly crafting a stained-glass window for a Catholic church. A writer crafting a memoir sharing the most important stories of their life. A physicist who devotes their life to advancing our understanding of participle behavior. All of these “immortality projects” express our drive to live on by attaining cultural significance and contributing to the greater social web of which we are a part. 

“The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count,” writes Becker. 

These endeavors provide comfort and relief from existential dread, making us feel that our own lives aren’t just a meaningless march to the grave. 

For Becker, the most effective way to achieve this sense of immortality was through expressing our creativity. We live on by becoming authentically who we are, creating and sharing works that reflect the truth of our being. 

Whether our creations end up having any real significance, they do seem to make us feel better about our existential plight. Research published in 2016 in the Journal of Creative Behavior found that creative achievements serve a positive function in easing existential anxieties and lessening the fear of death—particularly for people who value creativity. By creating something lasting to leave behind, artists and artistically-inclined people felt more at peace with the reality of death.

“As a valuable contributor to something larger, more meaningful, and longer lasting than mere physical existence, one gains the protection from mortality concerns offered by the culture,” the study’s authors write.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the quest for immortality: It’s all about how we do it. If we go the way of billionaires waging wars against the biological reality of aging, we might be barking up the wrong tree. But if the quest for immortality motivates us to create, to make our own dent in the universe and use our gifts to contribute to the collective, then we know we’ve transformed our fear of death from an enemy into an ally. 

Contemplating Mortality = A Creative Superpower

The dance between creativity and mortality comes further to light when we look into the minds and lives of great artists—Jerry Garcia, Sylvia Plath, Van Gogh, Edvard Munch—whose encounters with death and impermanence led to extraordinary works of art and creative flourishing. 

My favorite case study: Jerry Garcia, for whom death and impermanence was a constant life companion. When Garcia was five years old, he witnessed his father drown in the Trinity River while on a fly fishing trip. At 19, he miraculously survived a serious car accident which instantly killed the driver, his best friend. 

The experience altered the trajectory of his life. 

“I was a changed person,” he later said. “It [the crash] was cosmic …  It was where my life began. Before then I was always living at less than capacity. I was idling. That was the slingshot for the rest of my life.”

A few years later, he started The Grateful Dead, and devoted his life to music. Not long after the band formed, his mother drove off a cliff to her death. Nearly two decades later, he (again miraculously) emerged from a diabetic coma that should have killed him. When he came out of the coma, the first thing he asked for was his guitar. And of course, over the course of his life, his struggle with addiction took him to the edge of life and back many times.

All of this loss and trauma became the existential fuel behind one of the greatest bands of all time. (The Dead was the music I was raised on, thanks to my brother, whose death anniversary I honor each year by listening to “Box of Rain.”) Anyone can feel in Garcia’s music a sense of introspection, urgency and emotional resonance. As Grateful Dead biographer Dennis McNally said of the Dead’s music: “There is a richness that fills your soul.” 

While this may be an extreme example, his journey isn’t uncommon. 

The creative growth that occurs in the wake of loss and trauma is a phenomenon I explored at length in my book Wired to Create (co-authored with psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman). We looked at how adversity often fuels post-traumatic growth, a psychological and creative flourishing that goes beyond mere survival and resilience. Up to 70 percent of trauma survivors report some kind of positive psychological growth, which often includes creative growth and a new or renewed interest in artistic expression. 

Encounters with death—include being diagnosed with a chronic or terminal illness, experiencing a near-fatal accident, and losing a loved one—are among the traumas that psychologists commonly observe to fuel creative growth. 

When people experience these traumatic brushes with mortality and impermanence, psychologists have found that they not only display extraordinary resilience in their ability to bounce back from the trauma, but actually achieve an even greater level of thriving in the aftermath of the traumatic event. 

How does this work? From a psychological perspective, it’s all about the meaning-making function of art. Through writing, or dancing, or painting, or whatever it might be, creative expression helps us to make sense of our suffering and turn it into something meaningful and beautiful. The research clearly demonstrates that finding meaning is the operative force that allows for this transformation. Viktor Frankl, holocaust survivor and founder of existential psychotherapy, described the redemptive power of meaning when he famously said:. “In some ways, suffering ceases to be suffering in the moment it finds meaning.”

The message is clear: Brushes with mortality can unlock our creative flourishing. 

Out of loss, there can be creative gain.  

But as we’ve said before, you don’t have to wait for an illness, accident or devastating loss to wake up and change your life. By actively choosing to contemplate your own mortality, you light the existential fire under your ass that can push you to live a more meaningful and creative life. 

You can take the trauma of simply being alive—the basic anxiety of being mortal—and transmute it into the spark of creation. 

So take a good long stare into the abyss, and be prepared to welcome the muses ⚡️

1. Limitless with Chris Hemsworth (specifically the last episode).

2. Thanatobia, Artist’s Fear Of Death: Picasso Chose The Joy Of Life

3. “Death Valley: A Novel”, by Melissa Broder

4. “What Deathbed Visions Teach Us About Living,” The Daily.

5. Jon Kabat-Zin on the Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin