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Awareness of mortality can heighten discomfort with the body’s animal, vulnerable nature.

Cultural beauty standards may help people distance themselves from aging, illness, and death.

Healthier death awareness can foster respect for the body without tying worth to appearance.

The human body presents us with a psychological contradiction. It’s the source of movement, identity, pleasure, intimacy, and life itself... and yet it also ages, sweats, bleeds, becomes ill, and eventually dies. The same body that makes existence possible consistently reminds us that existence is temporary.

Psychologists studying terror management theory have examined what happens when this contradiction becomes tough to ignore. The theory proposes that, as humans, we manage the anxiety created by knowing we will die through cultural beliefs, identities, achievements, and standards that make life feel meaningful and enduring. A large meta-analysis found that reminders of mortality can influence our judgments and behavior, mostly on an unconscious level. We aren’t typically aware of the ways death can drive our thoughts and actions.

One especially provocative branch of this research concerns creatureliness: our awareness that, despite our smarts, culture, and carefully curated LinkedIn profiles, we are really just animals with vulnerable biological bodies.

The Body as an Existential Reminder

In a series of influential experiments, psychologist Jamie Goldenberg and colleagues proposed that people psychologically distance themselves from animals partly because animals remind us of physical vulnerability and death. When mortality was made salient (brought to awareness), participants showed a stronger preference for descriptions depicting humans as........

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