Death UNIT 1 SEMINAR

The first time I ended a serious relationship, I felt a lot of regret about it in the days after the breakup. I thought that I had hurt the other person (we had been together for a few years) and I worried that I had made the wrong decision. I kept thinking about all the different ways in which perhaps it could have worked out. I had to remind myself that I had very good reasons for ending the relationship and that my emotions were only telling one side of the story.

I believe this situation interrelates with the concept of death anxiety with respect to what Barnett, Anderson and Marsden (2018) showed in their study of the relationship between pessimism and death anxiety. They found that optimistic or pessimistic attitudes will change the extent to which one suffers from death anxiety. Pessimism tends to be more associated with high degrees of death anxiety than optimistic attitudes (Barnett et al., 2018). In my experience, I think that my pessimistic attitude towards my relationship was what really caused me to feel so much anxiety about it. I was never that optimistic about it. But I can see how optimism would make a difference in how one views a situation or transition—whether it is a breakup or something like dying.

UNIT 2 SEMINAR

A great war...

An attack like the one suffered at Pearl Harbor or a battle like the one at Verdun where so many young men lost their lives or the bombing of Hiroshima in Japan—these are events that could easily stand out as being instances in which Death is seen as the Great Leveler.
As a force that unites and separates, death has also been seen—especially following tragedies like 9/11. Because so many people felt that horrific, tragic moment even if they were not directly impacted by it, they nonetheless were able to put themselves in the shoes of those who were there and who did experience that tragedy. As Hoyer (2018) notes, some optimism can thus be pulled out of grim instances like this because people begin to feel like they are united in a common struggle.

In contrast, the media’s treatment of casualties in recent wars has served to separate us from death by depersonalizing the tragedies suffered by people in the Middle East. Their lives are not depicted as being human or as human lives lost as being meaningful to us. The media portrays so many people over there as just being enemies of America and people like Assad are portrayed as brutal dictators. Yet there is of…