THE TERROR MANAGEMENT THEORY OF SCREENWRITING

In Denial of Death, Ernest Becker wrote about homo sapiens:

This is the paradox: he out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die.

According to Becker, this drives us to make up stories about who and what we are, and, of course, the meaning of life.