What Men Think About Death

There is a joke — not a particularly funny one — that goes: men don't think about death, they just drive faster. Like most jokes that aren't particularly funny, it contains just enough truth to be slightly uncomfortable. The relationship between men and their own mortality is one of the more poorly examined areas of male psychology, which is somewhat ironic given that men die earlier, take more fatal risks, and are significantly less likely to engage with health services in ways that might delay the inevitable.

Men don't think about death less than women. The research suggests they think about it differently — and that the differences in how they think about it have measurable consequences for how they live, how they behave, and how they cope when death stops being an abstract concept and starts arriving in their actual lives.

This is not a morbid article. Or rather, it is exactly as morbid as the subject requires and no more. Death is one of the few experiences guaranteed to everyone, and the psychology of how men relate to it — their own mortality, the deaths of people they love, and the question of what a finite life is for — is worth examining with the same clear-eyed attention that this site brings to everything else.

The alternative is to keep driving faster and hope for the best, which hasn't historically produced outstanding results.

The terror management problem

In 1986, the social psychologists Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon and Tom Pyszczynski published a theory that has become one of the most extensively researched frameworks in social psychology. They called it Terror Management Theory, and its central claim is both simple and somewhat unsettling: a significant proportion of human behaviour — individually and collectively — is motivated by the management of death anxiety.

The theory draws on the work of the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, whose 1973 book The Denial of Death — winner of the Pulitzer Prize and sufficiently challenging to have been largely ignored for two decades — argued that the awareness of mortality is the central fact of human psychological life, and that the elaborate structures of culture, religion, achievement and identity that humans construct are, at some level, strategies for managing the terror that this awareness produces.

This is not a comfortable proposition, and it is not meant to be. But the research programme that followed Greenberg, Solomon and Pyszczynski's original paper has produced over 500 studies, conducted across dozens of cultures, that support the basic claim: when people are reminded of their mortality — even subliminally, even briefly — their behaviour changes in predictable and measurable ways. They cling more tightly to their cultural worldview. They respond more harshly to those who threaten it. They invest more heavily in activities and relationships that provide a sense of symbolic immortality — the sense of being part of something that will outlast them.

The implications for understanding male behaviour are considerable.

How men manage mortality anxiety

Terror Management Theory does not claim that people spend their days consciously terrified of death. What it claims is that the awareness of mortality operates largely below conscious awareness, and that a great deal of behaviour that appears to have other motivations is, in part, a response to it.

For men, the mortality management strategies identified in the research tend to cluster around a few consistent themes.

Achievement and legacy. The drive to build something that will outlast you — a career, a business, a body of work, a reputation — is one of the most socially endorsed responses to mortality awareness. The man who works obsessively, accumulates achievements, and invests heavily in leaving his mark is not simply ambitious. He is, in part, constructing a form of symbolic immortality that provides psychological protection against the awareness that he will die. This is not a criticism. It is a description of a mechanism that produces genuine social value alongside its psychological function.

Risk-taking. Terror Management Theory research has found that mortality salience — being reminded of death — increases risk-taking behaviour in men, particularly young men. The relationship between mortality awareness and risk-taking is complex, but one interpretation is that risk-taking serves as a form of death defiance — a demonstration of invulnerability that provides temporary relief from mortality anxiety. The man who drives too fast, takes unnecessary physical risks, or behaves recklessly in ways that seem to defy consequences is not unaware that death exists. He may be, paradoxically, more aware of it than those around him.

Stoicism and denial. The most direct strategy — simply not engaging with the subject — is also one of the most common. Men are significantly less likely than women to make wills, to discuss end-of-life preferences with their families, to engage with health services proactively, or to acknowledge the reality of their own ageing and decline. This is not ignorance. It is, in the Terror Management framework, a form of defensive exclusion — keeping mortality-relevant information outside conscious awareness because the alternative is anxiety that feels unmanageable.

Religion and meaning systems. Belief in some form of afterlife, or participation in a religious or meaning-making system that places death within a larger framework, provides direct anxiety management that the research consistently identifies as effective. Men who have a coherent belief system — religious or otherwise — that addresses the question of what death means tend to show lower death anxiety than those without one. This is not an argument for religion. It is an observation about the psychological function it serves.

Relationship and connection. Attachment to others — to partners, children, friends — provides a form of mortality buffer that is both psychological and symbolic. The man who is part of something beyond himself — who is known and loved, whose existence has left visible traces in other people's lives — has a form of protection against mortality anxiety that the isolated man does not. The research on social connection and death anxiety is consistent: people with strong relationships show less death anxiety and greater equanimity about death than those without.

What men really believe about death

Survey research on attitudes to death consistently finds that men and women differ in their beliefs about death, what follows it, and how they relate to their own mortality.

Men are less likely to report explicit fear of death than women — a finding that appears in study after study across cultures. They are also less likely to engage in behaviours that suggest they have confronted and processed their mortality: they make fewer advance care plans, have fewer end-of-life conversations, and are less likely to have thought through what they want at the end of their lives.

There are two possible interpretations of these findings. The first is that men genuinely have less death anxiety — that they are, for whatever combination of biological and socialised reasons, less disturbed by the prospect of non-existence. The second is that men have similar levels of death anxiety but are less likely to report it, having internalised the cultural message that fear — including fear of death — is not something a man admits to.

The research leans toward the second interpretation. When indirect measures of death anxiety are used — measures that don't require explicit self-report — the gender differences tend to shrink. Men appear to be less anxious about death when asked directly than when their behaviour and implicit responses are measured.

Men don't think about death less than women. They think about it in ways that are less visible — including to themselves. The silence isn't equanimity. It's management.

Death anxiety and how it shows up

Death anxiety — the fear of one's own death, the death of loved ones, or the process of dying — is a normal feature of human psychology. It exists on a spectrum from mild background awareness to clinical levels that significantly impair functioning, and its presence is not pathological. Its absence, paradoxically, may be.

In men, death anxiety tends to express itself through the indirect channels that characterise male emotional experience generally — through behaviour, through physical symptoms, through the displacement activities described by Terror Management Theory. The man who has become obsessively health-conscious following a friend's diagnosis, or who has developed a compulsive need to check in with his children, or who has thrown himself into work with a new intensity following a bereavement — may be managing death anxiety through the available outlets, without naming or recognising it as such.

Clinical death anxiety — the kind that meets the threshold of a diagnosable condition — presents as intrusive thoughts about death or dying, significant distress when death-related topics arise, avoidance of reminders of mortality, including hospitals, funerals and illness, and interference with daily functioning. It is treatable through CBT and related approaches, and it is worth naming as a clinical presentation rather than a character trait.

More commonly, death anxiety in men operates at a subclinical level that doesn't require clinical intervention, but that does influence behaviour, priorities and psychological wellbeing in ways that benefit from some conscious examination.

The midlife mortality reckoning

For most men, the abstract awareness of mortality becomes personal and concrete somewhere in midlife — triggered by the death of a parent, a serious health scare, the illness of a contemporary, or simply the accumulated evidence of a body and a life that are no longer pointing exclusively forward.

The midlife encounter with death — when death stops being something that happens to old people and starts being something that is heading specifically for you — is one of the more psychologically significant events in a man's life, and one of the least prepared for.

The death of others

Men's responses to bereavement are directly relevant here, because how a man responds to the death of someone close is partly a response to that specific loss and partly a response to what it means about his own mortality.

The death of a parent is, for many men, the first visceral reminder that they are, in many cases, next in line. The death of a contemporary — a friend, a colleague of similar age — is frequently more disturbing, because it removes the comfortable assumption that death is still some distance away and arrives in other people first.

The death of a partner produces, in addition to grief, a confrontation with the question of what life means and what it is for, stripped of the relationship that gave it much of its daily shape and purpose. Widowed men show significantly elevated rates of depression, physical illness and mortality in the period following bereavement — partly through social isolation, and partly, the research suggests, through the loss of the mortality buffer that a close relationship provides.

The death of a child is, in the research literature, the most psychologically devastating bereavement, and the one most likely to produce complicated grief and prolonged existential disruption. The father's grief — less visible, less supported, and less acknowledged than the mother's — is not less profound. It is differently expressed and differently accommodated by the social environment, which tends to respond to the visible grief more readily than the concealed kind.

Attitudes to one's own death

What do men actually want at the end of their lives? The research on end-of-life preferences in men — where it exists — suggests a reasonably consistent picture, with considerable individual variation.

Most men, when asked directly, report that they want to die at home rather than in hospital — a preference shared with most women, and a preference that is frequently not honoured, with the majority of deaths in the UK still occurring in hospitals and care homes rather than in the domestic settings that most people would choose.

Most men report wanting to maintain dignity and control at the end of life — to remain, as far as possible, themselves rather than patients. The fear of dependency, of loss of control, of being a burden, features prominently in men's accounts of what they dread about dying.

Most men have not discussed their end-of-life preferences with anyone. A 2019 survey by the Dying Matters coalition found that fewer than a third of people in the UK had spoken to someone close about their wishes for the end of life. The figure for men was lower. The reasons given — not wanting to upset others, assuming it wouldn't be relevant for a long time, simply never having got round to it — are recognisable and understandable. They are also, from the perspective of the people who will be required to make decisions on their behalf, a significant practical problem.

The practical case for having these conversations — making a will, registering a Lasting Power of Attorney, discussing preferences with a partner and, where relevant, with adult children — is separate from the psychological case, though both are compelling. In the UK, Dying Matters provides accessible resources on end-of-life planning and conversation. The NHS guidance on planning ahead covers the practical steps. In the US, The Conversation Project provides tools specifically designed to help people have end-of-life conversations with the people they need to have them with.

Towards a better relationship with mortality

The psychological literature on mortality and wellbeing points in a direction that is counterintuitive but consistent: the men who relate most healthily to their own mortality are not those who have successfully avoided thinking about it, but those who have engaged with it sufficiently to reach some degree of equanimity.

This is what the Stoic philosophers called memento mori — the practice of remembering death not as a morbid exercise but as a clarifying one. Marcus Aurelius, who ran an empire and fought wars and had rather more pressing things to do than meditate on mortality, returned to the subject repeatedly in his Meditations not out of morbidity but out of what he described as the usefulness of perspective. The awareness that time is finite is, in his account, not a reason for despair but a reason for attention — a reason to be present in the life you have rather than assuming it will continue indefinitely.

The contemporary psychologist who has most thoroughly explored this territory is Irvin Yalom, whose work on existential psychotherapy treats the confrontation with mortality not as a problem to be solved but as an ultimate concern that, when engaged with honestly, has the potential to transform how life is lived. His clinical observation — supported by research on post-traumatic growth and on the psychological changes that follow near-death experiences — is that mortality, properly faced, tends to produce an increased appreciation of life, a clarification of priorities, and a reduction in the trivial anxieties that consume so much psychological energy in its absence.

This does not require a life-threatening diagnosis, though those do have a concentrating effect. It requires, more modestly, a willingness to acknowledge that you will die — not as a theoretical position but as a genuine piece of information about your actual life — and to ask what that means for how you are currently living it.

The questions

The following are not comfortable questions. They are, however, considerably more useful than their avoidance.

What would you do differently if you knew you had five years? Not as a bucket-list exercise, but as a genuine examination of the gap between the life you're living and the life that matters to you. The answer tends to reveal priorities that the ordinary busyness of life successfully obscures.

What do you want to be remembered for? Not the achievements that look good externally, but the things that would constitute a genuine account of who you were and how you lived. This question has a useful way of distinguishing between what you're actually investing in and what you're merely performing.

Have you told the people who matter to you what they mean to you? The research on end-of-life regret is consistent: the things people wish they had done more of are overwhelmingly relational — more time with people they loved, more honest expression of what those people meant to them. These are not things that require a terminal diagnosis to act on.

What are you deferring, and why? The things consistently pushed to later — conversations, experiences, changes — tend to have mortality-related reasons beneath the logistical ones. Not enough time, not the right moment, when things settle down. The awareness that things may not settle down and the right moment may not arrive is, in the Terror Management framework, exactly the kind of mortality salience that produces behavioural change.

Something on clinical support

Death anxiety that has reached clinical levels — intrusive thoughts, significant avoidance, interference with daily functioning — is a treatable condition and worth bringing to a GP or a therapist rather than managing alone. CBT and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) both have evidence bases for death anxiety specifically.

Existential therapy — the approach associated with Yalom and others — addresses mortality anxiety within a broader framework of meaning and purpose, and may be particularly appropriate for men whose relationship with their mortality is entangled with questions about whether their life has been and is being lived in accordance with what they actually value.

In the UK, the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy provides a therapist directory. In the US, the Psychology Today therapist finder allows filtering by speciality including existential and ACT approaches.

The Resources page lists crisis and support services in both countries for men for whom death-related distress has become a crisis rather than a psychological question.