What is Terror Management Theory? | Joe Rogan and Whitney Cummings

I got super into terror management theory recently. What's that? It's basically like the guy that, Ernest Becker. This is my dad died a couple of years ago. And I hadn't really had a lot of death. And I started getting into it. And you called it too one time one day. You were like, you're doing too much shit. You're doing too much stuff. Stop doing so much stuff. And I didn't realize when you have death and your basically terror management theory is this is something you know, of course, but that because we have a prefrontal cortex and we're basically the only animal that can ponder the future in the past, we know we're going to die. And we can't tolerate that anxiety. It's too stressful for us. So we basically have to keep ourselves busy and do meaningless shit to feel important. We have to win awards. We have to have titles. We have to get things in order to have a sense of immortality. It's basically just managing the anxiety of knowing that we're rotting every day. It's just dying and could die at any moment. It's just like a false sense of control and longevity. There's a great book called The Worm in the Hole, Solomon. Something Solomon. I read this book and it totally blew my mind because I realized so many of my behaviors were just about this fear of death because it had been sort of right in front of me so quickly. And his death was so freak that it just, I had a really hard time coping with the anxiety of death coming so suddenly and so shockingly. And it fucked me up pretty bad. But I started just making myself busy with super irrelevant shit in order to try to cope with that anxiety. And so I got super into terror management theory. Terror management theory. Terror, like trying to manage the terror, the daily terror that we know we're going to die. Is that the book? The Worm at the Core. I tried something else. It's a less corny cover, the one that I have. But it's the same title? TMT, terror management theory. Terror management theory is a little bit controversial, I think, because it also justifies some like supremacy thinking, a lot of I'm better than you and like cultural superiority stuff. I'd have to, there's a guy named Solomon that did a talk about it just because you need so badly to feel important that you start to sort of have the delusion that you're better than other people. Just because you feel so insignificant because you know you're going to die. You know, we know we're a speck of dust. We know this is all ephemeral and fleeting. And that we don't matter. So we have to do things to feel like we matter. Oh, that makes sense. Because we don't. So you sort of exercise your superiority over people in order to shield yourself from the futility of your existence. Yes, and to feel immortal. And you know what I mean, to procreate the idea because we know our mortality is so present in our amygdala all day, every day that I'm better than you, therefore I'm going to procreate more and we are going to sustain and propagate so that we have a sense of lastingness. That's why we want to make a name for ourself. That's why we want to get famous, have tangible things, stuff like that. It's an anxiety that manifests in materialism, workaholism, needing titles, sort of shit like that. Wow, that makes sense. So nasty, evil people that subjugate all their employees and yell at everybody and that's what they're doing? No, they're going to die. Wow. Yeah, they know. But they don't even, it's so deep in the subconscious. They have no awareness of why they're behaving the way they behave. It's wild, they've done these studies where, because I got super into it, because I didn't recognize my behavior. I felt like kind of the zombie. I was trying to set up all these TV shows and I was writing all these movies. And I was just like, and I was like, this is so weird because my dad just died. I should know exactly what matters in life, which is none of this shit, achievements or money or any of that. But I was super into like, I gotta buy this house and I need to get this and this thing and this watch. And I was like, this is so not who I am, but it was me trying to cope sort of with all of this anxiety about death. But they did all these studies where they put, showed subjects of video and subliminal messaging, put one frame of just the word death, imperceptible to the actual eye. And afterwards they showed people pictures of woods or cities and said, where would you rather be? And you would normally go beautiful woods, nature. And they always pick cities because you just subconsciously felt more scared and wanted to be in a place that was safer, shit like that. Cities are safer than the woods? I mean, just the idea of some protection and civilization. The woods are scary because we're on some level know that we're only superficially at the top of the food chain. If we're out in the woods with a bear and there's no guns or cages, we're gonna lose. It's like the idea that we just know how vulnerable we are. That's interesting because I would feel like there's some anxiety attached to the overpopulation aspect of cities. For sure. There's gotta be some of that. And the cars and the noises. Constant noise, we're not designed for that, right? The fight or flight. We're always in fight or flight mode, basically.