The Creative Mind & Mortality Podcast

This episode turns toward a more difficult realization: the systems we rely on to create meaning are not as stable as they appear.Opening with Work Song by Hozier, this episode explores what happens when the structures that protect us from death awareness begin to strain. What initially feels like a love song reveals something more complex—an attempt to locate meaning not in permanence, but in relation.Based on Chapter 7 of Glass Bones, this episode examines what Ernest Becker identified as the core function of culture: to buffer us from the anxiety of mortality. But once that function is understood, another layer becomes visible. Culture is not a fixed system. It is a fragile architecture—one that must constantly be reinforced in the face of uncertainty and death awareness.Drawing from Terror Management Theory and the work of Ross Menzies and Rachel Menzies, this episode traces how that fragility manifests in everyday life. When worldviews are threatened, the response is often not curiosity, but defensiveness. Conflict, prejudice, and even violence can emerge as attempts to protect the symbolic systems that make life feel coherent.At the same time, modern culture has become increasingly sophisticated at avoiding death altogether—through distraction, consumerism, and the pursuit of extended life. What begins to take shape is not just denial, but an entire architecture designed to keep mortality at a distance.But fragility does not only produce conflict. It also creates pressure. And under that pressure, something else can begin to emerge.This episode asks what becomes possible when the structure no longer fully holds—and whether meaning might still be carried, not through systems, but through relation. Keywordscreative mind and mortalityGlass Bones podcastChapter 7: Fragile Architecture of Meaningdeath anxietyErnest Beckerterror management theoryRoss Menzies Rachel Menziesmortality awarenessworldview defenseexistential psychologyculture and death denialmeaning-making and mortalityconflict and belief systemsexistential philosophy podcastartists and mortalitysymbolic immortalitymodern death denialconsumerism and death anxietypsychology of beliefHozier Work Song meaning

Where does a body of work really begin?In this episode, I go back to two moments that stayed with me long before I had the language to understand them. A low-income apartment complex on Madison Avenue in Ogden, Utah. And years later, standing at the Sand Creek Massacre site in Colorado.At the time, they felt unrelated. Just experiences that didn’t quite resolve. But over time, a pattern started to emerge.This is where I begin to articulate what I now call Rupture Field Theory (RFT).Rupture isn’t dramatic most of the time. It’s often quiet. Something doesn’t fit. Something exceeds your ability to organize it into meaning. And instead of resolving, it stays in the system.In this episode, I walk through that structure:Rupture → Exposure → Anxiety → Threshold → Holding → Trace → Form → Witness → Meaning → ReturnNot as theory in the abstract, but as something lived. Something that moved from experience into the studio, into the darkroom, and eventually into the work itself.Most of the time, we move quickly to restore stability. We explain, translate, and close the gap. But creative practice offers another possibility—holding the instability long enough for something new to take form.This episode is about that space.Not resolution.Contact.Keywords:Rupture Field Theory, RFT, Quinn Jacobson, Glass Bones, creativity and mortality, death anxiety, existentialism, terror management theory, Ernest Becker, art and psychology, creative process, trauma and creativity, meaning-making, philosophy of death, Sand Creek Massacre, existential anxiety, art as process, darkroom practice, wet plate collodion, contemporary art theory, psychology of meaning, existential philosophy, awareness of death, creative transformation, artists and mortality