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> We all know we're going to die Not so sure about that. Ernest Becker wrote a book on the subject titled The Denial of Death (though some take issue with psychoanalysis, whether post-Freudian or not). Even when we tacitly admit to the seeming fact, we still hedge in that our family, religion, culture, species, knowledge, or stories will continue into an infinity that (so far as we know) doesn't exist (this ignores, of course, notions of an afterlife, which can be seen as fulfilling the same need under different constraints). The universe (again, so far as we now) is hurtling towards heat death, and ultimately, producing a billion more generations and having one big humanity party this weekend capped off with Kool-Aid all amounts to the same. Even then, infinity isn't really such a good anti-depressive. It's just that, unlike other animals (again, so far as we know) we have to craft such psychological defenses against our own analytic mental processes in order to fulfill the more fundamental drive of biological reproduction. |