6 ideas
Humans are split creatures: symbolic selves able to contemplate infinity and their own significance, yet housed in bodies that decay, excrete and die. Awareness of this contradiction produces a terror no other animal faces, and much human behaviour works to manage that terror.
Personality is not an authentic essence. It is a set of defensive strategies built in childhood to block awareness of helplessness and death. These 'character armor' habits let us function by narrowing perception. The price is that we live automatically and never fully face reality.
Every society is a symbolic action system that offers roles, status and achievements through which people earn a sense of cosmic significance. Participating lets individuals feel they belong to something that outlasts death. Conflict between cultures is therefore partly a clash of immortality projects: rival ways of cheating death threaten each other's validity.
People fuse with leaders, lovers or causes because merging with a seemingly powerful other relieves their own smallness and fear. This explains the pull of charismatic figures and group submission. Both offer protection and meaning at the cost of personal freedom and responsibility.
Modern people, lacking shared belief in God, often make a romantic partner the source of redemption and cosmic justification. No human can bear that weight. The partner's ordinary flaws then feel like betrayal, which disappoints the relationship and damages it.
Neurosis and depression can be read as breakdowns or excesses in the ordinary strategies for denying mortality. Some people see too much and cannot sustain the vital lie. Others shrink their world to a tiny safe zone to avoid life and death alike. On this view, mental health is not truth. It is a workable, culturally shared illusion.