Is Your Life Controlled By The Anxiety Of Your Inevitable Death?

Originally derived from the writings of Ernest Becker in the 1970s, terror management theory is the concept that the human awareness of inevitable death impacts everything humans do day to day. According to this theory, the anxiety caused by this awareness of mortality motivates many of our behaviors and feelings, from self-esteem to love. In order to cope with this anxiety and “terror“ of death, people have constructed culture, and subsequently have impacted self-esteem. The field of Terror Management Theory (TMT) was co-developed in the 1980s by American social psychologists Tom Pyszczynski, Jeff Greenberg, and Sheldon Solomon.