When you are conscious of death, proximal defenses work to purge death thoughts from your mind as soon as they arise. You tell yourself, “I still have a long time to live.”...
And as you go about your day, proximal defenses enable you to distract yourself, or suppress or rationalize away the daily reminders of mortality—the bags under your eyes, the news of distant earthquakes and bombings, and so on. As long as you can tell yourself “Not me, not now,” reminders of death are like so much white noise. In the absence of such defenses, you could be panicking about death all the time.
Only after death thoughts have been banished from consciousness do the distal defenses kick in. Back at your desk in the office, you daydream about getting the firm’s highest bonus this year and imagine your name on the plaque at company headquarters marking this achievement. By shoring up the sense that you are a significant person in a meaningful universe, you become a viable candidate for transcending death via immortality. “Not me,” you think. “Not ever!”
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