In mid-2023, my editor Leo, arguably correctly, urged me to eliminate a long section on terror management theory and what I called “nihility salience” from the book that was becoming “Lifehouse.”

Nihility salience is a guess about why the end of the world seems to weigh so much more heavily on us than even the thought of our own individual extinction: that it’s while we all understand on some level that we have to die, we tacitly count on the persistence of a civilization beyond our death to carry our works and the meaning we endow them with past that point. And it’s the prospect that it might involve an irrevocable writing down to zero of the value of everything to which we set our hand in life that most threatens us about the apocalypse.

Apocalypse means no armature of collective meaning-making will survive to carry the memory of our deeds, our name or our being down to the future. It will be as if we never were. I think that’s why people find the thought so unbearable.