Fear of death gets a lot of attention. Fear of irrelevance mostly doesn’t. Yet if you look at how humans actually behave, that quieter fear—the dread that when we are gone it will be as if we never existed—seems to drive much of the machinery. It is this fear that religion, spirituality, secular philosophies, and even celebrity culture all, in their different ways, are built to soothe.

In the 1970s, cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker argued in The Denial of Death that human civilization is essentially a defense mechanism against the knowledge of our own mortality. We are the animal that understands we are going to die, and we find that fact intolerable, so we build stories that insist our lives have enduring significance. Terror Management Theory (TMT), a later development in social psychology, puts this into experimental form: awareness of death creates deep anxiety, which we “manage” by embracing cultural worldviews that tell us what the universe is about and how someone like us can count as a person of value within it. Self‑esteem, in this framework, is not just a pleasant feeling; it is the sense of being significant in a meaningful world, and studies suggest it helps buffer us against the distress of mortality reminders.

From this perspective, the key human problem is not simply that we die. It is that death threatens to expose our lives as negligible. To counter that, TMT distinguishes two broad strategies: literal immortality and symbolic immortality. Literal immortality is religion’s core promise: the soul survives and goes on to Heaven, Hell, Nirvana, the next incarnation, or some all‑embracing oneness. Symbolic immortality takes over when that story no longer convinces; in that mode, we “live on” in children, nations, artistic or scientific work, institutions, or the memory of our name. Becker called these “immortality projects”: efforts to secure the sense that we were not just biological accidents but contributors to something enduring.

Once you see this, religion stops looking like a separate mental category and starts looking like one point on a spectrum of answers to the same question: “How do I matter?” At one end are formal doctrines of Heaven and Hell. Moving along the line, you encounter looser spiritualities in which “the universe has a plan for me” or “everything happens for a reason.” Farther still are nationalistic stories that promise relevance through being part of a chosen people or a “great nation,” and activist narratives that promise a place on “the right side of history,” another way of saying one will not be erased. Even overtly secular philosophies can function as immortality projects by promising that one’s work contributes to progress or to humanity’s “march forward.”

This is why simply stripping religion away and expecting rational enlightenment to flourish is naïve. The underlying need—to feel connected to something larger and more lasting than a single nervous system—does not vanish with doctrinal belief. Becker and TMT theorists are explicit on this point: the urge to secure meaning and symbolic permanence is built into our condition and cannot simply be “given up.” Secular people and atheists are not exempt; if anything, they are under more pressure to find non‑supernatural ways to meet the same need. Remove religion “cold turkey” without offering better ways to manage fear and irrelevance, and people are likely to trade familiar myths for newer ones: New Age movements, conspiracy cults, political messianism, or other systems that again place them at the center of some cosmic or historical drama.

The chapter “The Tao of Science” in Pandemic of Delusion addresses one common objection: that religion has a monopoly on the feeling of being connected to something greater. Classical Taoism, as described there, seeks oneness with the universe by suspending reason, treating rational thought as a barrier to harmony. Science takes the opposite route: it insists on reason and evidence, yet if that path is followed as far as knowledge allows, the sense of connection it delivers can be at least as powerful—and, crucially, grounded in fact.

Carl Sagan’s remark that “to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe” stands as a compact expression of this scientific “Tao.” It compresses 13.7 billion years of cosmic evolution into an everyday act, reminding us that the ingredients in a pie are the products of a long chain of natural events: post‑Big‑Bang matter condensing, stars forging heavy elements, planets forming, life evolving, agriculture emerging, and human culture inventing recipes. In that story, flour and sugar are star‑stuff, and the baker is a temporary arrangement of atoms produced in stellar interiors, briefly self‑aware, rearranging other atoms into dessert.

Science shows that the universe has a history and a kind of life cycle; it has been evolving in structure and complexity and will eventually “grow old and die.” Human evolution is not separate from that story but contiguous with it: atoms now organized as human bodies were forged in stars and cycled through countless organisms before taking this form, and they will return to the larger system. In that sense, we are not guests in the universe; we are the universe, in a particular configuration, looking back at itself. Recognizing this does not require any supernatural additions, yet it can provide precisely the sense of oneness and embeddedness that religious and spiritual systems promise.

Seen this way, science and fact‑based thinking do not leave a person forlorn and disconnected; they offer a way to feel relevant and connected without pretending the universe is designed around us. Our existence becomes meaningful not because a cosmic plan singles us out, but because a 13.7‑billion‑year chain of events has produced beings able to understand and influence a small part of that chain. For many, that realization can be not only intellectually satisfying but emotionally sustaining—an honest alternative to the fake constructs that proliferate when the need for relevance is denied rather than redirected into more grounded perspectives.

Modern culture adds its own twists to how we seek permanence. Contemporary information systems make it easier to spread comforting falsehoods and harder to maintain a disciplined, fact‑based view of the world. The same networks that propagate conspiracy theories and miracle cures also propagate stories about personal significance: follower counts, likes, and shares become continuous, numerical feedback on “do I matter?” in an attention economy. Celebrity culture intensifies this further. Commentators have noted that celebrities often seem to inhabit a kind of secular afterlife; their images and narratives remain visible and emotionally potent long after their deaths, sustaining fantasies of immortality for those who identify with them. Fame becomes a form of symbolic immortality in which the worst fate is not moral failure but obscurity.

If irrelevance is the real terror, this makes celebrity an especially seductive immortality project. It reframes significance as visibility: to be constantly seen is to count; to be forgotten is to vanish in a deeper sense than physical death. In that environment, it is unsurprising that many people’s immortality projects center on building a “personal brand,” collecting followers, or “going viral” at least once—even when these projects rest on distortion or spectacle rather than substance.

Donald Trump is a vivid example of a particularly toxic part of this spectrum. Over decades of interviews, his comments regarding an afterlife have been all over the map. What has been consistent is not any theology but an intense focus on visibility, branding, and ratings. His preoccupation is marking every enduring structure of society with his name. He wants history to remember him, and one is justified in concluding that, if given the choice of being remembered for a hundred years as a good president, or a thousand years as an infamous one, he would choose the latter.

In one reported exchange about Washington, D.C. monuments, he remarked that a previous leader “should’ve put his name on it” because “you’ve got to put your name on stuff or no one remembers you.” That line could serve as a plain‑language gloss on symbolic immortality: physical objects and institutions become canvases on which to inscribe “I was here” in as durable a way as possible. From a TMT standpoint, this is not mysterious pathology but an especially visible form of the same underlying process: the self turned into an immortality project, seeking not divine approval but inescapability in the human story.

Becker and TMT theorists are clear that this drive to secure meaning and permanence cannot simply be relinquished. The question is not whether people will engage in immortality projects, but which ones they will choose, and with what consequences. Religion, nationalism, celebrity worship, and various spiritual or ideological movements can all function as such projects—some relatively benign, others demanding denial of evidence or hostility toward those who threaten the story. Fact‑based thinking and science do not abolish the need but they do offer a way to satisfy it in ways more compatible with reality and with living alongside others.

From this vantage point, the most constructive stance is not simply “against religion,” but “for fact‑based thinking.” If habits of evidence, critical self‑correction, and scientific curiosity are cultivated, the appeal of fake constructs tends to weaken on its own, because it no longer feels necessary to sustain them. A person who understands themselves as a conscious fragment of a 13.7‑billion‑year‑old universe, embedded in networks of ancestry, ecology, and culture, does not need a fabricated cosmic destiny to feel that life matters; they can locate meaning in contributing to understanding, reducing harm, and leaving behind structures—ideas, practices, institutions—that continue to function after they are gone.

The call to action, then, is both personal and social. Personally, it is to recognize the fear of irrelevance in one’s own life—not as a flaw to be ashamed of, but as a feature of being a symbolic animal that knows it will die—and to choose, deliberately, which stories will be allowed to answer that fear. Socially, it is to build cultures, institutions, and educational practices that direct our hunger for significance toward projects that are reality‑based and humane: science, art, honest public service, durable communities, and fact‑anchored inquiry.

No one gets to opt out of the need to matter. But it is possible to decide that the ways we seek to matter will not be based upon delusions. In that sense, advocating for fact‑based thinking is not about taking away people’s sense of meaning; it is about offering a way to secure it that does not require golden idols, invisible plans, or committing mass shootings. Taking joy in being a brief, conscious expression of a very old universe is already a remarkable kind of relevance; the task is to let our stories, and our actions, appreciate and take comfort in that fact.