Here are my slides from the Last Lecture I delivered in June 2019 at the Stanford Graduate School of Business at the invitation of the Class of 2019. I've been invited to deliver a Last Lecture in the past but for various reasons had to decline--this year I was able to accept the honor, and I'm very grateful that I did. Thank you to everyone who attended, and particular thanks to Valerie Shen for extending the invitation and to Amanda Donohue-Hansen for such a thoughtful and touching introduction.
Notes
This talk doesn't directly address the topics covered in my Art of Self-Coaching course at the GSB, but the concepts explored there form a foundation for this work.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) was a professor of anthropology and a philosopher who wrote extensively on the subject of mortality. His 1973 book The Denial of Death, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1974, two months after Becker's death, provides a complex but thorough overview of his thinking. The quotes below are from the 1997 Free Press edition:
The human paradox
The essence of man is really his paradoxical nature, the fact that he is half animal and half symbolic.
He is a symbolic self, a creature with a name, a life history, [but] his body aches and bleeds and will decay and die. It is a terrifying dilemma.
Terror management
This is the terror: To have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life & self-expression—and with all this yet to die.
The fear of death must be present behind all our normal functioning, in order for the organism to be armed toward self-preservation.
But the fear of death cannot be present constantly in one’s mental functioning, else the organism could not function.
The basic motivation for human behavior is our biological need to control our basic anxiety, to deny the terror of death. (Sam Keen, from the Foreward)
Heroic projects
[Society is] a hero system that allows us to believe that we transcend death by participating in something of lasting worth. (Sam Keen)
Where our animal selves and symbolic selves intersect, we encounter particularly powerful heroic projects--thus the topics of this talk: sex, fame, money. Our heroic projects are ultimately futile efforts to transcend mortality, but they're also necessary for our sanity. This can make them dangerous, particularly when we're unaware of our heroic projects or are induced to adopt them by social factors.
Reading List
BOOKS AND ESSAYS
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End (Atul Gawande)
The Denial of Death (Ernest Becker)
Dying: A Memoir (Cory Taylor)
Gratitude (Oliver Sacks)
Mortality (Christopher Hitchens)
The Red Hand Files, Issue #6 (Nick Cave)
UC Berkeley Commencement, 2016 (2016) (Sheryl Sandberg)
The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End (Katie Roiphe)
The Year of Magical Thinking (Joan Didion)
When Breath Becomes Air (Paul Kalanithi)
Why Mortality Makes Us Free (Martin Hägglund, The New York Times)
POETRY
"Aubade" (Philip Larkin)
"For the Anniversary of My Death" (W.S. Merwin)
RELATED POSTS OF MINE
Not Every End Is a Goal (On Midlife Malaise)
Gualala (On Mortality and Gratitude)