It Is Knowing We Will Die That Makes Us Human

Sheldon Solomon's answer arrives before the small talk is over. The uniquely human awareness of death, and the unwillingness to accept it, is in his view the primary motive for almost everything people do, whether they know it or not. Lex Fridman has invited the Skidmore social psychologist onto the podcast as co-developer of terror management theory and co-author of *The Worm at the Core*, the book that carried Ernest Becker's claim into the lab: fear of death sits at the center of the human condition and drives most of what civilization builds.

Solomon likes to open a psychology class by defining terms. Students get *ology* right away. They guess that *psyche* means mind. That, he says, is a modern gloss. In ancient Greek it means soul, but not the Cartesian kind that might detach from a body and fly off on its own. Aristotle, who coined the word, was no dualist. Soul, for him, is the essence of a natural body that is alive. If an axe were alive, its soul would be to chop. If you could pluck out an eyeball and it still worked, the soul of the eyeball would be to see. A grasshopper's soul is to hop; a woodpecker's is to peck. Which raises the only question that matters in the room: what is the essence of a human being?

There is no agreed answer. Aristotle gives us rational animals, *Homo sapiens*. The historian Johan Huizinga called us *Homo ludens*, playful at the root. Hannah Arendt offered *Homo faber*, the toolmaker. Ellen Dissanayake wrote *Homo Aestheticus*, arguing that we are creatures who need beauty as well as reasons. Others call us *Homo narrans*, storytelling animals. Solomon finds all of those labels useful. The line that caught him as a young punk sat in an 1860s essay by the Scot Alexander Smith, in a book called *Dreamthorp*: it is our knowledge that we have to die that makes us human. He remembers the gut reaction. He did not like the sentence. He thought the man was onto something.

William James, the Harvard philosopher who is often called the first academic psychologist, named the same thing the worm at the core of the human condition. The phrase is an allusion to Genesis. In the Garden everything was going well until the serpent tempted Eve to bite the apple of the tree of knowledge, Adam followed, and death entered the world. From Solomon's vantage the story is an allegory of the origin of consciousness: vast intelligence finally notices that it will end. The apple is beautiful and tasty. At the center is finitude.

In 1980 Solomon was a young professor at Skidmore College with a Ph.D. in experimental social psychology. Most of his work had been with clinicians, testing whether non-drug interventions could lower stress. It was decent work and he found it interesting. In his first week he walked the library shelves and found books by a cultural anthropologist he had never heard of. Ernest Becker had died in 1974, weeks before he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction for *The Denial of Death*. That book was supposed to be a thousand-page giant; the leftover half, finished by Becker's wife Marie, became *Escape from Evil*.

Becker's first paragraph is the thesis in miniature. He believes that the terror of death, and the way human beings respond to it or decline to respond, is primarily responsible for almost everything we do, whether we are aware of it or not, and mostly we are not. Solomon read it and felt the same click Fridman would feel years later in his own twenties. Then the book pulled a memory. The day before his grandmother died, his mother had told him to say goodbye, she was not well. He said okay. He knew she was ill. He did not grasp the magnitude.

She died the next evening. He sat with his stamp collection, sad, then the thought chain started. Grandmother is gone, which means mother will die, and after that who makes dinner, and the stamps are full of dead American presidents. Washington is dead. Jefferson is dead. Mother will be dead. I will get old and be dead someday. At eight that was his first explicit existential crisis, a blood-curdling realization he spent the rest of childhood trying to ignore. Standing in the Skidmore stacks in his mid-twenties, he understood why Becker had him. The argument squared with a night he had never metabolized.

What seized him about Becker was a juxtaposition he had rarely seen. *The Birth and Death of Meaning* frames the story in evolutionary terms. *The Denial of Death* is existential psychodynamics. Evolutionary psychologists are usually eager to dismiss the psychodynamic camp as speculation without data. The psychodynamic camp fires back that evolutionary psychology is a pile of just-so stories. John Bowlby, the attachment theorist, was one of the first serious academics to say the two ways of thinking are compatible. Solomon, young and unfashionable, saw no intrinsic conflict. Combined, they were more powerful.

Fridman asks how confident a life's work can be when the mind is still mostly unknown. Solomon wants it both ways, which he takes to be the proper epistemological stance. Socrates first: I know that I don't know. He will argue forcefully that we know more than we used to. He will argue equally that Thomas Kuhn was right, and that change is not necessarily progress. Psychological scientists, he says, too often mistake statistical precision for insight, and they make the error Einstein bemoaned, the hope that piling up data will by itself produce a conceptual breakthrough.

On his first day of graduate school at the University of Kansas, one wall quoted Kurt Lewin: there is nothing more useful than a good theory. The other quoted a German physicist: all theories are wrong. Solomon's private question was, which is it? Both, he decided. Theories are not copies of the truth. They are tools that point attention. For an experimental psychologist they are hypothesis generators. Assertions yield tests; the results corroborate, reject, or force a rewrite. That is the dialectic he would apply, point by point, to Becker's literary-sounding claims.

Solomon has known Jordan Peterson for thirty years. In the early days Peterson called their work nonsense, worried that they treated all meaning as arbitrary and paid too little attention to religious forms of it. They later spent two days together at the Ontario Shakespeare Festival talking about *Macbeth* from a psychodynamic angle, and got along. Peterson told him to film every remark and put it on YouTube. Solomon does not think the advice was about money. It was about connection. Their remaining disagreements sit on two axes. Peterson is more committed to the virtues of the Judeo-Christian tradition, a contemporary Kierkegaard insisting there is one leap into faith. Solomon's reply is that it is one way, not the only way, to find meaning.

The second fight is political economy. Solomon wants to write a book called *Why Left and Right Are Both Beside the Point*. Liberal and conservative political philosophy are, he says, intellectually and morally bankrupt because each is framed on assumptions about human nature that are demonstrably false. Peterson did not mind the swipe at liberalism, which is close to Steven Pinker's critique of the blank slate. He minded the swipe at conservatism. That tradition, Solomon argues, starts with John Locke's 1690 claim that in a state of nature there are no societies, only autonomous individuals striving to survive. He calls it one of the most obviously wrong assertions in the history of thought, and the seed of the individual right to unlimited property that later licensed neoliberal economics.

Locke, whom Solomon insists is a genius, was trying to shift power away from divine-right rule. In the state of nature you have a right to live and to keep the fruit of your labor. The problem is that people are, in Solomon's translation, assholes: it is easier to crack a skull for an apple than to walk a mile to a tree. Retaliation escalates into a state of war, so people trade freedom for security and invent government to protect property. Your body is yours; labor mixed with a thing makes it yours; a fence around apple trees, or around Nebraska, is fine because the world is endless. Then money arrives, a concentrated symbol of wealth that does not spoil, so the industrious may accumulate without limit. Inequality, for Locke, is natural and good. A rising tide lifts all boats. Adam Smith adds the invisible hand: everyone pursuing self-interest leaves everyone better off.

Solomon sees two cracks. Humans were never a non-social species; Plato and Socrates, starting from interdependence, were closer to the truth, and Margaret Thatcher's line that there is no such thing as society is Locke's echo. Locke could tell the English to take empty America, or kill a few savages; Melville could imagine whales that never run out. The world is not infinite now, and unlimited private wealth does harm those nearby. Radical inequality is a psychological and physical disaster. Poverty itself, he says, is not the worst fate if you are not starving and have a place to be. The torture is living poor beside the obscenely rich. Relative position, not the absolute number, is what cuts. Marx as economist he will not defend. Marx on human nature, on capitalism's need to dehumanize labor into a fleshy cog, and on the conflict between owners and makers, he thinks has been borne out. Thomas Piketty's point is the same arithmetic: returns on capital outrun wages until the house of cards falls. Solomon would rather slow the rate of progress than ride Schumpeter's creative destruction. The countries that score well on lifespan, education, alcoholism, and suicide are mixed economies: markets, high taxes, public services.

Conservatives are half right, Solomon says, when they call people innately selfish and use that as a hymn to unbridled wealth. They miss the other half. We are also innately generous and reciprocating. Yale studies of fourteen-month-old babies, before they can walk or talk, find that a child given a toy will give something back when asked. Intention matters more than outcome. If an experimenter seems to try to hand over a bottle and drops it, the baby still reciprocates later. If the child sees someone treat another person unfairly, help is withheld. We are born ready to repay, even beyond what we actually received, on the basis of what someone meant to do.

Early Richard Dawkins, whom Solomon prefers to late Dawkins the way some people prefer the early Beatles, already said reciprocation and cooperation are fundamental. Seeing evolution only as individual competition is a one-sided view, easier to model, farther from the world. The same temptation shows up in physics, where complexity looks like a mess that is hard to compute and closer to the truth. Adam Smith himself treated us as bartering creatures and knew government had to keep a level field, and that education, public health, and infrastructure are poorly done for profit. Solomon's political wish is a system that maximizes individual autonomy and creative self-regard while using our cooperative side to stay stable. Capital systems, he notes, are built on infinite growth, which is a good deal for malignant cells and compound interest and a bad one for a steady state.

He parts with Steven Pinker on the claim that the world has never been better and that the job is to keep making and buying stuff. Falling violence and rising living standards across centuries do not capture the chance of a painful collapse in the next one. Jared Diamond's *Collapse* is the pattern he trusts: civilizations often fail right after they look unbeatable. John Gray and the psychohistorian Robert Jay Lifton share the worry. Ethnic tension, environmental damage, economic instability, and what Solomon calls a petri dish of psychopathology all sit on the table. Quiet economic pain, closed businesses, broken dreams: Fridman, reading *The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich*, hears how bitterness looks for an other, and how often that other becomes the Jews.

Becker's account of how we manage existential terror is a three-part kit: a culturally constructed belief system that makes life feel meaningful, a sense of personal value called self-esteem, and the perception that we are meeting the standards of the role we play. If you have nothing, Solomon says, you are nothing. A lot of jobs are gone and not coming back, which is not only a food problem. Marx's line was that you are what you do. Lose the doing and the self goes with it. The vacuum is easily filled by a tribe defined by hatred of somebody else. John Gray in the 1990s and Hannah Arendt in the 1950s both saw the mechanism: money chasing money across borders, local upheaval misattributed to a scapegoat, demagogues who do not invent hate so much as redirect it. Max Weber called the figure a charismatic leader, seemingly larger than life, often believed to be divinely ordained to rid the world of evil. Becker used Weber to explain Hitler, elected in extraordinary existential distress on a promise to make Germany great again. Under the affection for such leaders, good and bad, Becker put death anxiety.

Two days before September 11, 2001, George W. Bush had the lowest approval rating in the history of presidential polling. Three weeks later, after he said America would rid the world of evildoers and told *Time* that God had chosen him to lead in a perilous hour, he had the highest. Solomon's lab treated 9/11 as a giant death reminder: people dying, plus the symbols of American greatness, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, brought down. The experiments that followed are, in his words, disarmingly simple. One group writes thoughts and feelings about dying. Or people are stopped in front of a funeral home rather than a hundred meters away. Or, in the lab, the word *death* flashes for 28 milliseconds, too fast to see, while they read something else.

After those primes, people drink more water if a celebrity is selling it, eat more cookies, want fancier clothes, sit closer to people who look like them, and change whom they vote for. In 2003, looking toward the 2004 election, Americans in control conditions did not care for Bush or his Iraq policy and preferred John Kerry's. Reminded of mortality first, they liked Bush a lot more. Every study ran in the same direction. What Solomon is proudest of is not that his group ran the experiments. It is that independent labs around the world, unconnected to him, replicate and extend them. That, he says, is when it becomes science.

Fridman connects the findings to the Stoic *memento mori*, the practice of keeping death on the table so that life comes into focus. Solomon calls that the ballgame. Since antiquity, he says, philosophers and theologians have agreed that a full life requires coming to terms with death; after that, anything is possible. Stoics, Epicureans, the *Tibetan Book of the Dead*, medieval monks with a skull on the desk: same assignment. The twist, and he flags it as counterintuitive, is that the lab primes are faint. You do not even know death is on your mind. Those unnoticed reminders produce the drinking, the shopping, the tribal seating, the vote shift. The most problematic human reactions to death anxiety are, in his phrase, malignant manifestations of repressed death anxiety. Bury it under the psychological bushes and it comes back as bitter fruit.

What the theologians are asking is different. Spend considerable time, not as a goth wallowing in imagery, entertaining the fact that you too will pass, until personal transformation becomes possible. Fridman makes it personal. Are you afraid of death? Is the research itself a way of not dying? Solomon says yes, absolutely. He and his collaborators Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski met in graduate school in the 1970s and have done this work for forty years. He admits, not proudly, that experiments, books, and lectures have been his way of avoiding a direct confrontation by turning anxiety into an intellectual exercise. Every so often he thinks he is making progress as a human. Then he reminds himself that he is probably not, and that he, like everyone, has been more occupied with what the ideas do for his self-esteem than with feeling them.

The first time he finished *The Denial of Death* he was so flabbergasted he took a year's leave. He did construction and restaurant work, menial on purpose. If Becker was right, he was a culturally constructed meat puppet doing things for reasons he did not know, in order to assuage death anxiety. That, he told himself, was not acceptable. Becker himself makes the puzzle sharper. Born Jewish, claiming atheism, he later converted to Christianity and said he became religious when his first child was born. He stayed agnostic about an afterlife. *The Denial of Death* gives a chapter to Kierkegaard, who sent people to the university for knowledge and to the school of anxiety if they wanted to become more mature.

Kierkegaard's assignment is to let a vague dis-ease about death seep in until you see that your present identity is a cultural construction. You did not choose the time and place of your birth, your name, even the social role you occupy, except from the local menu. We have been living a lie of sorts. Becker calls it a necessary lie. Shrug off the accoutrements and ask who you are, and you reach the Greek-tragic worst: to be no one, no thing, dangling on the precipice of oblivion. Some people tumble in and never come out. Kierkegaard says you can also rebuild from the ground up. The New Testament image is that you must die to be reborn. His only road is the leap into faith, and in his case faith in Christianity: unbridled faith in cultural constructions will not hold; only a transcendent power will. Becker, at the end of *The Denial of Death*, admits there is no way to tell, then still advocates a religious stance.

A few years before this conversation Solomon started reading Heidegger's *Being and Time* and wondered why Becker, who cites him in passing, never took him more seriously. Heidegger reads to him as a secular Kierkegaard. What makes us feel unsettled, not at home, is death anxiety. One path is flight: cling unreflectively to cultural constructions. Kierkegaard said people tranquilize themselves with the trivial. Heidegger borrows the word and dislikes it, because tranquilized sounds subdued, when most culturally constructed meat puppets are frantically busy so they never sit still long enough to think about anything that counts.

Heidegger's other path starts with a sharper fact. It is not enough to know you will die in some vague future. That is still denial, a way of saying not me, not now. You have to know that death can happen at any moment: a comet, a virus after a stop for gas, any number of unanticipated endings. Then comes existential guilt. You are thrown into parameters you did not choose, male, Jewish, working-class American, and you still have to choose and own the choosing. Rilke's phrase, which Becker uses, is the guilt of unlived life: you have already amputated possibilities by choices made and, just as often, declined. If you get that far, Heidegger describes a turning, away from flight, toward a horizon of anticipatory resoluteness with solicitous regard for others, so that life seems an adventure perfused with unshakable joy. Anticipatory is already hopeful. Resolute means steadfast. Solicitous, a word Solomon had to look up, means you are concerned about fellow humans. Heidegger, he notes, is not Mary Poppins. The novelist Sherwood Anderson is the reminder he keeps: life, not death, is the great adventure. Fridman offers a gloss Solomon likes. Kierkegaard is a leap of faith in God. Heidegger is a leap of faith in life.

Fridman is surprised Becker is not more popular. He asks almost every guest whether they fear death and usually gets a thin answer: I know it will happen, not today, I just want to live well. Looking in their eyes, he does not think they have sat with it. Solomon can say what not to do. As young, annoying psychologists they would lay out the ideas, hear I don't think about death like that so you must be wrong, and reply that the person was comfortably ensconced in a worldview that supplied self-esteem and spared them the pain. That is a Freudian trap: agree and I am right, disagree and you are repressing and I am still right. Fridman describes his own rare descents as stepping out of a shared narrative and drowning. Solomon says that is the school of anxiety, shrugging off the gear that lets you stand up in the morning. A publisher who had done Malcolm Gladwell books once told them she was interested, if they could write it without mentioning death, because people do not like death. They said it was kind of central.

Religion, Solomon says, can be framed as both disease and cure. A case can be made that humans are innately religious, if the word is handled carefully. He has read that religion evolved early, before consciousness and death-anxiety, from a Latin root meaning to bind. Durkheim treated it as a we-feeling: uber-social creatures taking comfort in physical proximity, a transcendent exuberance close to Heidegger's unshakable joy, whose first job was cohesion and coordination. Only later, some claim, did belief systems that promised immortality get selected. David Sloan Wilson's *Darwin's Cathedral* says religion has nothing to do with death and everything to do with making groups viable, a group-selection view that is still disputed. Solomon's camp sees religion as finally inseparable from assuaging death.

Karen Armstrong, the nun turned historian, argues that religions at their best teach the Golden Rule and foster ingroup prosocial behavior, with psychological and physical benefits. The bad news is that a lunatic fringe can hijack any of them, declare exclusive ownership of the rites, and turn the best of religion into crusades and Holocausts. Solomon grew up skeptical: without these beliefs we would not kill each other over them. His parents said judge people by character, then told him not to come home without a Jewish wife, which implied that everyone else was an inferior form of life. Amin Maalouf's *In the Name of Identity* is the warning he cites: unless we overcome tribal mentality, this will not end well. He is still a fan of faith in a non-dogmatic sense. He finds less resistance to Becker in Jesuit schools; secular humanists are the most disinclined. Fridman thinks that is because they do not think philosophically. Science can be a cozy focus on details that lets you escape the mystery. Charles Peirce said beliefs are the basis of action. Without some, you cannot stand up in the morning. At Skidmore, Solomon's first-week assignment is Plato's cave. The prisoners have to be dragged into the sun. He asks what is wrong with that picture. Students say nothing. He says: how do you know you are not in another cave? The minute you think you have reached the end of the trail, you have already succumbed to laziness or dogmatism or both.

Asked what consciousness is, Solomon says that if he could answer he would be drinking rum from a coconut with a Nobel Prize. He agrees with Pinker that it is the key question for twenty-first-century psychological science. He does not think it is a phenomenological afterthought. Dan Wegner and others treat awareness as an integrated rendering of something already over, with about a half-second delay, which is where free-will debates get stuck. Dawkins, mostly in notes to *The Selfish Gene*, found it hard to imagine consciousness without an adaptive job, and guessed mental simulation: run the scene in your head instead of finding out the hard way. Nicholas Humphrey, in the 1980s, guessed it arose to predict others, a rudimentary theory of mind, more social intelligence than intelligence as such. Nietzsche said a solitary creature would not need consciousness, then called it the most calamitous stupidity by which we shall someday perish. Solomon's reaction: dude, relax. Fridman has a stranger intuition. His inner conversation has always been with death. The fact that he is a thing is constructed by dialogue with the thing that says he will not be. Solomon hears that as kin to the simulation idea.

Shortly before Fridman contacted him, a group in New York asked Solomon to consult on a screenplay: an embodied female AI, thirty years on, Heidegger and Levinas and an Italian philosopher, Silvia Danso, on the reading list. The twist is that the most advanced machine learns her creator made her mortal. The question is what happens, phenomenologically and behaviorally, when an AI knows it will die. Fridman, who wants robots a human can love, thinks some form of mortality is essential for deep connection, even if it is not required for raw intelligence. Shallow thinking about death and shallow thinking about AI are, he says, the same habit. A program already has a terminal state. The hard part is making the end a fact the system knows, with no answer from the code about what any of it means. That is where the terror lives, and in Solomon's language it is the creative force. Engineers, Fridman observes, are not the ones writing those scenes. Science-fiction authors and philosophers are.

Solomon asks whether machine ethics is imaginable without some semblance of finitude. Fridman does not think a machine will out-solve trolley problems humans cannot solve. He thinks ethics is a dance, and you have to tango the way the rest of the humans tango. Pedestrians stepping in front of a car put their lives in someone else's hands; death is in the game, not as billiard-ball trajectories but as a world model of what the other is thinking. He once made a Roomba scream in pain and immediately anthropomorphized it. He believes a robot and a human could fall in love. Solomon thinks it is already happening. A serious book about people who started with sex dolls and ended in relationships of enduring significance refuses to dismiss them as perversion. The rare users, they agree, are often looking for companionship, not sex. We are deeply lonely. Consciousness lets you know, as Erich Fromm wrote in *Escape from Freedom*, that language is a pale shadow of interior life. You can be desperately lonely in a house of ten in the middle of Tokyo. Gatsby, throwing the biggest party on Long Island, is alone.

Fridman wonders whether academia can still harbor people who think this way. Solomon worries about young scholars. Restrictions and expectations make work of real innovation unlikely; stepwise improvement of an existing paradigm is what the system pays for, and that is not nothing, but it is not the whole job. Forty years ago Princeton asked what he would do if they hired him. He said he did not know, he wanted to think and read. He watched the window shut. They called his mentors and told them to get the kid some pants. He had hair to his waist and, he says, looked like Charles Manson. Fridman, wearing a suit at MIT, felt the inverse pressure: do not wear the suit. Hair, clothes, manners: not a left-right fight. A tribal one. Places that claim to want renegade thinkers should, in Fridman's view, glorify the outsider.

Two days after Princeton, Skidmore asked the same question, got the same answer, and offered him a job that afternoon, which he declined for months under pressure from mentors who thought he would get nothing done there. Skidmore's pitch was: take your time, show up for class, don't molest barnyard animals, and you will probably get tenure. He bargained that he would show up for class. Their first terror-management paper was rejected at every journal and took eight years to publish. He submitted the manuscript with the reviews and a note on why he still thought the idea was pretty good, and they gave him tenure anyway. He does not know whether even Skidmore would do that now. Graduate training had made him a statistician and methodologist unscathed by knowledge, a method in search of a question. Skidmore gave him five years to read. A history professor in a bow tie and a philosopher with leather patches on his jacket taught him that you can simply be as you are. When he first arrived, other professors assumed the twenty-something in their doorway was housekeeping, there to empty the garbage. He wants students to learn not to judge an idea by the appearance of the person who offers it.

He is apprehensive about pandemic-era claims that all learning can go virtual. He is big on embodied rooms with actual humans. Fridman is a stickler for in-person interviews, even flying to Paris for a conversation nobody is waiting on, because some of what matters is not in the words. Solomon felt within five minutes that he could speak freely; he does not think a screen delivers that easily. Fridman is more hopeful about future technology, having stood in front of a life-size Microsoft virtual wall and walked a VR plank despite a fear of heights as real as any physical drop. What Silicon Valley's education experiments do usefully, he thinks, is reveal that we have no idea what makes teaching work. Thomas Sowell's charter-school argument, which Solomon has only heard in interviews, is that public schools are broken and charters outperform them regardless of who attends. Education may be civilization's most important job, and we do a terrible one, while valuing almost anyone above teachers. Fridman adds police officers to the list of undervalued public servants and calls "defund the police" a stupid slogan that misses the point. Solomon agrees. Black neighbors on one side, three generations of police across the street, thirty years of getting along. He tells them every day to thank the force. He does not want those concerns tribalized.

Asked for three books that shaped him, Solomon says he spent the four-hour drive perseverating. He counts Becker as one person and three volumes. *The Birth and Death of Meaning* sits the argument on an evolutionary base. *The Denial of Death* is the skeleton of the theory. *Escape from Evil* applies it to economics, inequality, and the inability to live in peace with people who do not share our beliefs. For fiction he loves Camus, especially *The Plague*, and recites the last line: we learn in times of pestilence that there is more to admire in men than to despise. In 2020 it reads as a book about love. The lesser-known pick is Carson McCullers's 1953 novel *Clock Without Hands*, set in the segregated South, about a man who learns he is terminally ill. He starts as anyone might: more hostile to people who are different, petty, in denial. As he comes to terms with mortality, it ends lovingly. *Being and Time* he will not pretend is light. It took him forty years, like *Ulysses*. Philosophers, he notes, mostly work the first half. The second half, the flight from death and the turning, is where Heidegger starts to shine for him.

Advice for the young comes with a disclaimer: if I don't listen to me, don't listen to me. Existentialists say life has no meaning; it does not follow that life is meaningless, only that it has no single inevitable meaning. Kierkegaard said consciousness gives us the possibility of possibilities. Oswald Spengler, citing Goethe, said the purpose of life is to live. We yearn for freedom, rebel when choice is cut, then choke on a sea of options. For most people choice is a first-world problem. Sometimes the best move is to do something, and if that fails, do something else. Solomon may be at the tail end of the last American generation that picked one job and kept it for forty years, expected to out-earn their parents, and could infer that the world in a decade or two would still resemble this one. Those days are gone. Negative advice, then: do not define yourself as a social caricature. He is a professor, until most of the schools go out of business. Someone else is a restaurateur, until there are no restaurants. Do not hitch how you feel about yourself to a host of uncertain, maybe temporary variables. Stepping out of that identity, as Fridman said, is extraordinarily discombobulating. That is why the work is hard, not because the idea is complicated.

If the soul of an axe is to chop, what is Sheldon Solomon's? He thinks of his two children, late twenties and early thirties. When people who know them say the kids are kind and decent, that is what he wants. Intelligence is vastly overrated. The Unabomber was smart. He admires intelligence and venerates education, but if he had to pay homage to himself it would be as someone who takes himself too seriously to take himself too seriously. Corny as it sounds, he would like to leave the world a tad better, or at least do no harm. At sixty-six he is not wrapping up. Looking back he feels awe, wonder, gratitude. Grandparents from Russia and Austria, some who never made it out; a father on two full-time jobs whom he saw on weekends. Why are you always working? So you won't have to. The world does not owe you a living. First take care of yourself, then take care of other people. Fridman thanks him for turning Becker's insights into experiments and helping start experimental existential psychology. Solomon's group describes themselves as giant interneurons with no original ideas. Maybe the only original thing is that they do not claim originality. They connect discourses that did not talk. Existentialists used to ask, evidence, what's that? He leaves listeners with the Nabokov line that opens *The Worm at the Core*: the cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.