Sheldon Solomon - The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life

Policy Punchline

Sheldon Solomon is Professor of Psychology at Skidmore College. He is best known for developing terror management theory along with Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski, which is concerned with how humans deal with their own sense of mortality. He studies the effects of the uniquely human awareness of death on human behaviors. He is co-author of several books, including the one we’ll be discussing today – The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life. I was initially drawn to Prof. Solomon’s work because I listened to a three-hour long podcast interview between him and Lex Fridman. It was the most enlightening podcast I had listened to on the Lex Fridman Show, without exaggeration. That was a few months ago during a time when I was very confused and stressed. I was working nonstop every day and deciding between whether to pursue an economics PhD or go into the “real world” to work for a few years first before reassessing. Prof. Solomon’s ideas from taking a leap of faith in life to confronting the possibility of death were truly profound and changed a lot of my thinking back then.