6 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
Bill Perkins's 2020 argument — that optimal life planning means spending down your wealth entirely by death, that experiences should be front-loaded while health allows full enjoyment, and that dying rich is a failure of optimization.
American cultural anthropologist — author of The Denial of Death (1974) — which won the Pulitzer Prize posthumously two months after Becker died of cancer — who argued that all human culture is a death-denial mechanism.
Oliver Burkeman's 2021 philosophical argument — that the average human life is 4,000 weeks, that the belief you can get everything done is an avoidance of this reality, and that embracing finitude rather than optimizing against it is the path to meaningful life.
Plato's dialogue narrating Socrates's final hours in prison — the conversation about the immortality of the soul on the day of his execution — presenting four arguments for the soul's immortality (cyclical argument, recollection, affinity, final cause) and ending with Socrates calmly drinking the hemlock.
Leo Tolstoy's 1886 novella about a high-court judge who, facing terminal illness, confronts the emptiness of his conventional life — widely considered the greatest literary meditation on death and authenticity in Western literature.
Ernest Becker's 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning synthesis — arguing that human civilization is fundamentally a response to death anxiety, and that all cultural symbols, heroism, and immortality projects are death-denial mechanisms.