Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
The basic motivation for human behavior is our biological need to control our basic anxiety, to deny the terror of death. Human beings are naturally anxious because we are ultimately helpless and abandoned in a world where we are fated to die. “This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feeli... See more
Ernest Becker • The Denial of Death
Ernest Becker's extraordinary book, The Denial of Death.
Irvin D. Yalom • Staring at the Sun
Becker argues that the only way to transcend these existential fears is to live a life that feels heroic. He argues that “if everyone honestly admitted his urge to be a hero it would be a devastating release of truth.”
Paul Millerd • The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life
Becker’s radical conclusion that it is our altruistic motives that turn the world into a charnel house—our desire to merge with a larger whole, to dedicate our lives to a higher cause, to serve cosmic powers—poses a disturbing and revolutionary question to every individual and nation.
Ernest Becker • The Denial of Death
It was Ernest Becker who pointed out: “...early men who were most afraid were those who were most realistic about their situation in nature, and they passed on to their offspring a realism that had a high survival value. The result was the emergence of man as we know him: a hyper-anxious animal who constantly invents reasons for anxiety even where ... See more
The Comfortable Life is Killing You
