45: Don’t Fear The Reaper, with Molly Conisbee Artwork

Your Brain On Climate

Psychology vs climate change: what we think, why we think it, and how it all adds up to a planet-sized emergency. Each episode host Dave Powell interviews experts in how our brains work - from PhDs in psychology to writers, activists and beyond. They'll talk about how their brains and our brains do (and don't) work, and how all of that might help make sense of the climate crisis - and possibly what to do about it.

All Episodes

Your Brain On Climate

45: Don’t Fear The Reaper, with Molly Conisbee

September 16, 2025 • Episode 45

I'm afraid that you are going to die. Sorry. You can imagine afterlives and amass great hordes of wealth, but you're still made of human stuff, and thus will die. Humanity's inability to get its head around this most inconvenient of truths is probably behind most of the silly pointless stuff we do, from rampant consumption to wars to spaceships to conjuring up Gods.

Joining me on this episode of Your Brain on Climate is Molly Conisbee - author of No Ordinary Deaths, a social history of how we've lived and died through the generations. Molly says we can learn a huge amount about how societies choose to live by how they deal with death - and why coming to terms with the fact that we will all (probably) cark it might lead us to do better by the climate in the here and now.

We learn how our relationship with death, the afterlife, and messy mortality, has changed hugely over the years. When we're ever more botoxed and scared of aging, and billionaire-backed scientists are actively trying to cure death, are we running ever more away from the most human - and beautiful - thing of all?

Let me know your thoughts on the show - hello@yourbrainonclimate.com.
Please rate, review and subscribe, and share the show on socials.
Please consider chucking this humble indie podcaster a few quid at www.patreon.com/yourbrainonclimate.

Owl noises = references:

28:07. God on the rise with young people.
29.09. Yougov tracked people's belief in ghosts etc.
30.07. Roger Clark's Natural History of Ghosts.
34.51. Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday.
39.12. A wiki on Ernest Becker's Denial (not Fear!) of Death.
56:40. Make a death / memory box,

The show is hosted and produced by me, Dave Powell. You can follow the show on instagram @yourbrainonclimate, and I occasionally put up a Substack.

YBOC theme music and iterations thereof, by me. Show logo by Arthur Stovell at https://mondial-studio.com/.