Andrew Hartz is the Founder and Executive Director of the Open Therapy Institute. On June 17, 2025, The Wall Street Journal ran a column by Hartz. The column was titled, "Why Is Everything An Existential Crisis?" Hartz began the column by saying this: "So-called existential risks seem to be everywhere. Climate change, artificial intelligence, nuclear war, pandemics and more threaten to return us to nothingness." Let me add something. This ennumeration is clearly only a "partial list."
Hartz says that the word "existential" points to catastrophic global threats, but it also echoes the concerns of existentialist philosophy, which addresses a range of topics from freedom to alienation." In fact, though, says Hartz, "at the bottom of the vogue for this exotic term may be the basic human fear of death." Hartz goes on to note the following (emphasis added):
A prominent psychological theory, Terror Management Theory, posits that all people have anxiety about their mortality and that they cope with it in predictable ways. A robust body of evidence indicates that when people are reminded of their death, they try to boost their self-esteem, take steps to create a legacy and defend their worldview—be it secular or religious.
An extension of this theory is that people cope with anxiety about death by focusing their fears onto something more tangible, such as a current political cause. That cause can then become emotionally loaded with all of their anxiety and distress about mortality. This temporarily makes their anxiety feel more manageable, but it’s likely to contribute to fanaticism and emotional dysregulation around politics.
Political causes aimed at tackling “existential” risks are often associated with safety culture.... People come to yearn for an omnipotent state as the means to protect them from all their fears. They imagine total state control to protect them from all the internal feelings they can’t tolerate. Anxieties like this can easily become fodder for authoritarianism.
Politics won’t solve our deeper problems. Meaning and purpose have to be found on one’s own, and people must develop ways to manage the uncertainties and risks of life. This can be challenging, but it’s the only path toward fulfillment, wisdom and freedom—to say nothing of mental health.
Realizing that I am "rounding third," I have stepped up my acknowledgment that I am, inevitably, going to die - that I am "Fixing To Die," to quote a Bob Dylan song. My efforts at "Memento Mori" have become more focused, and I have been working on a list of "positives," to counteract the "negatives" that Hartz has identified. My list is only a "partial list," too.
In fact, as I have thought about Hartz' column in The Wall Street Journal, I have been struck by the fact that my assertion that we live, ultimately, in the "World That God Made," the "World Of Nature," is a truth that we all too often try to elude. That "Memento Mori" advisory is telling it true. We do, all of us, have to die, and our best course of action is to celebrate our lives, as we live them, instead of trying to fool ourselves into thinking that we, or our "great works" - of literature, or art, or architecture, or of military and warlike domination and conquest, or of some kind of political accomplishment - are going to be able to change our "existential" situation.
Let's not be reluctant to face up to "Nartsuk." "Fear Not" is good advice.
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