The meaning of the end
Why I am launching a new venture called Mortals
A bit of housekeeping: you may have noticed a bit of a change. Notes from the Edge is now Mortals.
This newsletter will be the long-form home for my new venture. You can read about the launch on Twitter. Much of what I write will remain the same, but will be more focused on how we might awaken to life through our mortality. If you’ve been keeping up with the Weekly Reviews, you may have noticed a thread of research around this. I’m talking about meaning-making, death anxiety, psycho-spiritual care and other topics. Mortals will be the wrapper that engages in all of that. I’m so excited to do this, and I hope you will continue to join me in this journey. With that in mind…
I’ve been working in and around death for nearly 10 years. If there is one thing I’ve learned, it is that we should strive to become aware of and accept, rather than fear, the inevitable end of life.
I think it is so important that I want to dedicate more time to meaningfully explore and confront our mortality and help others discover it to be an empowering experience. And I want us to do it together.
So I want to delve into the intricate facets, challenges, and opportunities that come with being aware of our mortality.
Instead of viewing death as something that just causes a feeling of impending dread or is something to be avoided and denied at all costs, I want us to see death as a motivating force that can help us focus on what genuinely matters, no matter where we stand in the journey of life.
The goal with my new venture Mortals, is to become a cornerstone of support for individuals and communities, helping them navigate the existential complexities that define our age.
What is Mortals?
Mortals guides you in embracing your mortality to profoundly enrich your life,
with evidence-based psychological tools combined with traditional and
contemporary practices contained within a compassionate, online community.
In writing this, I wanted to take the time to unpack these complexities, exploring how mortality awareness impacts both our psychological well-being. I’ll discuss the process of meaning-making, advocating for its centrality as a supportive mechanism when dealing with the awareness of our finite existence.
This is a foundational guide to mark the launch of Mortals, intended to spark curiosity and hopefully shift your perspective concerning life's most ultimate questions.
I want you to emerge from this exploration with a embryonic, nascent, felt-sense of empowerment. Knowing that we can equip ourselves with the mental and emotional tools necessary for each of us to face the existential challenges of our times with resilience and wisdom.
People inherently seek to construct and find meaning in life. Meaning-making is essentially the process of finding or creating purpose in one's life. It is the core defining quality that marks us from other animals in the natural world. As Dr Paul Wong writes:
Human beings are meaning-seeking and meaning-making creatures, living in a world of shared, socially constructed meanings. They react to perceived meanings rather than actual events, and they actively and constantly engaged in meaning-construction in order to make sense of life.
This life-long search helps us to make sense of often contradictory experiences and offers protection against the inherent fears surrounding an inevitable part of life that humans are uniquely troubled by: knowing that we will die one day.
The motivations for survival and the quest for meaning are intrinsically linked, particularly when survival itself becomes a struggle. Meaning becomes even more essential for maintaining hope and happiness during times of suffering. Victor Frankl, who survived the Nazi concentration camps and went on to pioneer existential psychotherapy once said:
Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.
People throughout history have had a powerful way to mitigate against suffering, to maintain hope and make meaning. They had religion. However, the decline in religious belief in the West has eroded a once-reliable framework for understanding death and dealing with life-altering events like illness or loss. This decline has left many people confronting the biggest existential challenges - including awareness of their mortality - in isolation, bereft of traditional spiritual support.
The world we live in today further exacerbates these existential dilemmas. Unique once-in-a-century, or once-in-a-epoch challenges such as coronavirus pandemics and climate change not only heighten individual mortality awareness but also add layers of complexity in coming to terms with it, especially for vulnerable groups.
What is important to learn is that embracing a life filled with meaning can serve as a psychological buffer against the existential fear of death. In fact, it can help foster a hopeful and fulfilling existence, and renew our relationship with life. Knowing we will die - and the fear inherent in it - is a key part of our self-development, and a key part of our life. As Confucius remarked:
“We have two lives, and the second begins when we realise we only have one.”
The psychological process of creating meaning has been shown to be particularly beneficial for vulnerable groups such as cancer survivors, the elderly, and those at risk of suicide. Furthermore, research shows that the collective aspect of meaning-making in group settings significantly diminishes death anxiety, underscoring the value of communal support and shared experiences.
Despite its evident importance and transformative potential, the concept of meaning-making has been largely overlooked in the realms of health promotion and therapeutic interventions. Moreover, it has yet to be leveraged as a tool to address the complex existential challenges that define our lives in the 21st century.
We collectively face multiple challenges - the polycrisis - that underscore the importance of grappling with existential issues. We are seeing dramatic increase in chronic illnesses, with 2 million people now living with Long COVID. This surge in long-term Ill health amplifies the need for comprehensive long term, holistic healthcare and care planning that can actually be meaningfully engaged with. At the same time, the UK's climate has warmed by 1°C since the 1970s, escalating the frequency of extreme weather events - the most visible expression of a climate in breakdown - which all together is causing increased existential anxiety, especially amongst younger people. One recent report by the Financial Times, charted the collapse in young people’s mental health, with the most disturbing change over the 10 years in the escalation of the sentiment that “life often seems meaningless”.
The COVID-19 pandemic has further highlighted the ever-present risk of global health crises, while geopolitical tensions, particularly the threat of nuclear conflict in Ukraine, add another layer of existential threat. We’ve crossed a point in the development of Artificial Intelligence where the technology is now seriously considered as an existential threat to humanity.
We live - as the Chinese curse goes - in interesting times.
Meanwhile, religious belief, often a traditional source of solace and guidance for existential questions, has waned significantly. In the 1980s, two-thirds of England's population identified with the Church of England; by 2019, this proportion had dwindled to just one-third. The rise of the Nones, is a worldview that continues to strip our collective ability to hold onto old ways of making meaning. We are free - or forced - to find meaning all by ourselves.
But together, these converging factors — increasing chronic illnesses, environmental and geopolitical instability, and a decline in religious faith — intensify the need for discussions and engagement around mortality and existential concerns.
From where I stand - with my work in palliative and end-of-life care research and innovation at Imperial College London - I don’t feel like people are given the chance to really engage with their mortality when it matters. Particularly for people near death, but really more broadly for everyone who will ever be near death. (That includes me and you).
For people receiving a terminal diagnosis there is a lack of psycho-spiritual care to help them navigate these existential issues. Research has shown that professionals frequently neglect to include spiritual care, despite the premise that palliative care is holistic, and should caters for a person’s whole - physical, psychological, social and spiritual - needs.
As a result of this, I believe there is an urgent need for new paradigms and support systems to help people face the reality of death, find meaning, and, ultimately, live more fulfilling lives. Particularly for those experiencing the end of their life, but for everyone regardless of their health condition.
Importantly, this is an opportunity to go beyond the duality of sick and well people who do or do not need to engage with their mortality. It is a false dichotomy. The recognition and subsequent suppression of our barely conscious or unconscious mortality awareness is universal and is worthy of engagement. But all this requires us to tackle the biggest barrier to change: fear.
Fear is the overriding emotion that is associated with being aware of one’s mortality. But fear of death is not an all-encompassing singular thing. It is in fact quite layered.
Psychologists Mario Mikulincer and Victor Florian outline three main types of fears that people generally have about death. The first kind is what they call 'intrapersonal fear.' In simple terms, this is the fear that you haven't achieved everything you wanted to in life. People may ask themselves: Have I lived fully? Have I met my life goals? People may also worry about the physical aspects, like what happens to your body after you die. The idea is that if you feel you've lived a fulfilling life, this type of fear might lessen.
The second type is 'interpersonal fear,' which revolves around the relationships you have with others. You might worry about how your family and loved ones will cope after you're gone or if you'll be forgotten. Mikulincer and Florian’s work suggests that if you have made adequate preparations for your loved ones' well-being, you're likely to feel less anxious about this.
The third is what they term 'transpersonal fear,' which goes beyond the personal and interpersonal to consider what happens after death on a spiritual level. This could involve fears about punishment in the afterlife, or concerns about what sort of legacy you leave behind. According to Mikulincer and Florian’s research, seeking redemption, forgiveness, or spiritual peace can help alleviate this particular kind of fear.
Fears about death are not just about the end moment, but also about whether we've lived a meaningful life, how our absence will impact those we care about, and what, if anything, comes next. It all requires an understanding of your attitude towards your mortality.
That is why Mortals is built upon a core product that enables anyone to understand - through robust empirical data - what their attitude to their mortality is. It’s called the Mortality Attitude Profile. It is a simple questionnaire designed to help you understand how you feel about death your assignment of one of seven Mortality Types, that describe your attitude through key psychological sub-scales such as acceptance, fear, and empowerment.
Most people don't really understand their own viewpoints on death until they're forced to confront it—often at a time when it's too late to make meaningful changes. This is compounded by the decline in spiritual frameworks that previous generations had at their disposal. However, even in the absence of religious beliefs, confronting death doesn't have to be an exercise in fear and terror.
Many people find meaning through what Ernest Becker termed "immortality projects" – essentially, the legacies we leave behind, be they familial, professional, or artistic. These legacy projects can significantly shape our behaviour and give us purpose. They are also the creative drivers for change. The orientation of a person through their life course to search for and make meaning is cemented in their pursuit of legacy projects, which are multi-varied and unique for everyone. It goes beyond practical and legal activities like making a will and capturing preferences for how your social media will be used once you are dead: it is the active engagement with a future world that you will not exist in.
This engagement in legacy is particularly pronounced for older people. In his Generative Theory, Erik Erikson identified that as people progress through life, they endure eight developmental crises. The penultimate crisis in the middle of adulthood is associated with an understanding that life is ending and leads to either the development of ‘generative’ behaviours for the benefit of future generations, or to ‘stagnation’, with the cessation of being an active contributing member of society.
Respectfully to Erikson, I think that this desire for legacy is not limited to older adults, but is a core human pursuit: It is a key component of meaning-making. We can feel its power when we collectively experience the death of a famous musician, or poet. Their works are forever enshrined in our collective culture, even when they themselves die. We feel it in our bones that creating something that outlives us is a key function of how we make meaning and life a purposeful life.
This work is deep stuff, and requires us to tread carefully. But for all the complex reasons explored, I think it's crucial for us to try and work towards a life where we have a level of acceptance towards our mortality. This work is about ultimately finding your own way to accept death as a natural, inevitable part of life, without necessarily needing to demystify what happens after we die. Acceptance is not about removing the unknown or the awe surrounding death; it's about coming to terms with it in a way that allows us to live more fully, aware of our finite time.
By orienting ourselves towards an acceptance of our mortality, we become more free to live our lives as it comes to us, which has the exponential potential to radically change how we see ourselves and behave collectively.
And so my aim with Mortals is to create a place where people, at any stage of life, regardless of background or life experience, are equipped with the tools, insights and community to leverage the understanding of mortality as a driving life force, propelling them to prioritise what truly matters.
This journey is beginning with this first step. I hope you will join me on it.
Want to join Mortals?
If you are interested in doing Mortals, you can apply to join the free pilot that will begin online in October 2023.
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