Mark Manson - The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F__k (2016, HarperOne) - libgen.li

Because it wasn’t just his anti-establishment tendencies that got Becker
into trouble; it was his odd teaching methods as well. He would use
Shakespeare to teach psychology, psychology textbooks to teach
anthropology, and anthropological data to teach sociology. He’d dress up as
King Lear and do mock sword fights in class and go on long political rants
that had little to do with the lesson plan. His students adored him. The other
faculty loathed him. Less than a year later, he was fired again.
Becker then landed at San Francisco State University, where he actually
kept his job for more than a year. But when student protests erupted over the
Vietnam War, the university called in the National Guard and things got
violent. When Becker sided with the students and publicly condemned the
actions of the dean (again, his boss being Hitleresque and everything), he
was, once again, promptly fired.
Becker changed jobs four times in six years. And before he could get
fired from the fifth, he got colon cancer. The prognosis was grim. He spent
the next few years bedridden and had little hope of surviving. So Becker
decided to write a book. This book would be about death.
Becker died in 19774. His book The Denial of Death, would win the
Pulitzer Prize and become one of the most influential intellectual works of
the twentieth century, shaking up the fields of psychology and anthropology,
while making profound philosophical claims that are still influential today.
The Denial of Death essentially makes two points:
1. Humans are unique in that we’re the only animals that can conceptualize
and think about ourselves abstractly. Dogs don’t sit around and worry
about their career. Cats don’t think about their past mistakes or wonder
what would have happened if they’d done something differently. Monkeys
don’t argue over future possibilities, just as fish don’t sit around
wondering if other fish would like them more if they had longer fins.
As humans, we’re blessed with the ability to imagine ourselves in
hypothetical situations, to contemplate both the past and the future, to
imagine other realities or situations where things might be different. And
it’s because of this unique mental ability, Becker says, that we all, at
some point, become aware of the inevitability of our own death. Because
we’re able to conceptualize alternate versions of reality, we are also the
only animal capable of imagining a reality without ourselves in it.