ABSTRACT
When I was 16 years old, I saw the world as turned upside down. I saw people trivializing their lives by bickering, struggling, and dramatizing their experiences while failing to focus on issues of personal identity and ignoring existential reality. I had a strong realization that they were living their lives as though death did not exist and that powerful defenses operated to deny this information. Furthermore, I sensed that this denial played a part in people's insensitivity and inhumanity to other people; their conformity and lack of a definitive point of view; their passive, dulled, paranoid orientation toward life experiences; and their disregard of themselves as unique, feeling entities.
