07/06 2021
Death is certain. What's uncertain is whether anything we do matters. We might build careers, families, or create things, but all of it ends. Even memory fades. Eventually, there's no one left to remember us. What disturbed me wasn't just mortality, but the realization that everything I worked on would disappear. No legacy. No echo. Just silence. The anxiety wasn't abstract. It was personal.
Reading Becker's The Denial of Death clarified this: the core fear isn't death itself, but the finality of it. We don't just die—we vanish. What lingers is how we react to that knowledge.
Becker identifies a critical distinction between two responses to this awareness: the neurotic and the artist. Both perceive the arbitrariness of meaning. Both see through the social fabric and understand its symbolic construction. But they diverge in response.
The neurotic internalizes the absurd. He's aware the world is meaningless but cannot detach from the desire for significance. He is stuck between knowing heroism is false and still needing to be a hero. The result is paralysis, fantasy, and fragmentation.
He still needs to be a hero... but he can glorify himself only in fantasy, as he cannot fashion a creative work that speaks on his behalf by virtue of its objective perfection.
The artist faces the same abyss but responds by creating. He doesn't seek rescue, he is an architect of his own structure. His work doesn't promise immortality, it simply gives shape to terror. He externalizes dread, translating chaos into form.
The creative person... reveals the dread of the human condition and fabricates a new symbolic transcendence over it.
This isn't salvation. It's transformation. The artist takes existential clarity and renders it into objectivity. He makes the absurd visible, not to escape it, but to articulate it.
Rejecting the need to be remembered isn't surrender. It's autonomy. Art doesn't last forever, but it affirms agency in a void. The artist doesn't overcome death—he names it. Existential sanity isn't about comfort. It's about form.
Standing on the gallows with my head in a noose
Any minute now I'm expecting all hell to break loose
People are crazy and times are strange
I'm locked in tight, I'm out of range
I used to care, but things have changed
Things Have Changed --- Bob Dylan