Thanatos Rising: Is Our Western Obsession with Decay Just Maranasati in Disguise?

[falling_tuesday]

I just finished reading that piece in The American Scholar called Thanatos Rising, and honestly, it stuck with me. The author tracks this cultural fascination with death and decay, framing it as a distinctly Western response to modern fragility. It echoes the Buddhist practice of mindfulness of death—traditionally called maranasati—but stripped of the monastic context and dressed up for a postmodern psyche. I think the article nails it when it suggests our collective Thanatos impulse is basically maranasati for the anxious, scroll-addicted generation.

At 52, I’ve got enough life experience to know that staring at mortality doesn’t exactly cure you of it, but it does change how you move through the days. I fell into tarot reading back in my thirties during a brutal breakup. I was in Spokane, staring at rain-streaked windows, trying to make sense of a life that felt completely unspooled. I didn’t start treating the cards as prophecy. I never really believed in that. Instead, I use them as journaling prompts. When the Ten of Swords or the Death card shows up, it’s not a warning. It’s an invitation to sit with what I’m avoiding. That’s where the Jungian connection clicks for me. Carl Jung wrote extensively about how confronting the shadow requires facing the structures we’d rather ignore. The Death card, in that framework, isn’t about literal mortality. It’s about the necessary collapse of an ego pattern that’s no longer serving us.