I had to crack up at this story. The man’s narcissism runs *so* deep, and, well, his sheer… denial of certain facts of life.
“The irony of man’s condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation…
The great boon of repression is that it makes it possible to live decisively in an overwhelmingly miraculous and incomprehensible world, a world so full of beauty, majesty, and terror that if animals perceived it all they would be paralyzed to act. … What would the average man do with a full consciousness of absurdity? He has fashioned his character for the precise purpose of putting it between himself and the facts of life; it is his special tour-de-force that allows him to ignore incongruities, to nourish himself on impossibilities, to thrive on blindness. He accomplishes thereby a peculiarly human victory: the ability to be smug about terror.
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
