Dr. David DeSteno
speaker
1,091 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2025
last heard Aug 2025
Dr. David DeSteno’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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a good person or your karma is going to be bad and your next life is going to be in a worse position or you're going to go to hell and have pain for some period of time or perhaps everlasting and so it takes on this moral tone and that fear is very motivating right we know from the psychological literature if you want to get somebody to do something fear is a great way to motivate them the problem with that is is if you're constantly afraid of it all the time
Your body is in the state of anxiety, and that's not healthy for you.
And so I think a lot of faiths try to kind of reinterpret fear of death in a different way.
Death isn't always bad.
So one thing you'll find in a lot of faiths is they ask you to contemplate your death.
So in Buddhism, there are meditations that are focused on thinking about yourself dying.
There's even these intense forms of meditation.
I forget the actual...
word in the original language but they're basically called corpse meditations where people the monks will meditate in front of a decaying corpse over days as a way to study that you can actually see and experience what will happen to you
In Christianity, right, there's this sense of contemplate your death on Ash Wednesday, which is the start of the season before Easter.
In many traditions, the priest will put ashes on your head, or the minister will put ashes on your head and say, from dust you came, to dust you will go.
It's a reminder that you're gonna die.
In Judaism, it's interesting, even on their New Year's, which is Rosh Hashanah, that's a celebratory day, there's this prayer they say in temple called the Unatan Tokef.
And part of that is, who's not going to be here next year?
Look around.
Some will die by flood, some by famine, some by illness, some by fire.
And again, it's a reminder that life is ephemeral.
And so the trick with this is,
if you can think about your death and not in a morbid way, not in a way that you dwell on it, it's actually quite useful.
So the one thing we know in psychological science is that as people age, their values change, right?
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