readings

I will review—or at any rate visit—three strategies of restoring meaning to life that are widely on display as human responses to anxiety about death.

• Discount the future—and live for the present.
• Disindividuate—and identify yourself with cultural entities that will survive you.
• Deny the finality of bodily death—and believe the individual self to be immortal.

— Humphrey, Nicholas. Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011.