This is great, thank you.

I think you would be interested in Terror Management Theory if you aren't already familiar with it. I'm currently reading The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. TMT is based on it.

The theory argues that religion is one of many possible, necessary lies to live in a terrifying world as spiritual and physical beings: spiritual because we seek meaning, a reason for our existence, and physical because we must die. Religion is a collective solution to the problem that "we all want to be something more than a shitting and fucking creature that dies."^[1]

Culture and art are other ways to achieve similar heroism: the courage to live and accept death, rather than repress it or live in constant terror of it.

Btw, as an artist, you might like what Becker has to say about you:

The key to the creative type is that he is separated out of the common pool of shared meanings. There is something in his life experience that makes him take in the world as a problem; as a result he has to make personal sense out of it. This holds true for all creative people to a greater or lesser extent, but it is especially obvious with the artist. Existence becomes a problem that needs an ideal answer; but when you no longer accept the collective solution to the problem of existence, then you must fashion your own. The work of art is, then, the ideal answer of the creative type to the problem of existence as he takes it in—not only the existence of the external world, but especially his own: who he is as a painfully separate person with nothing shared to lean on. He has to answer to the burden of his extreme individuation, his so painful isolation. He wants to know how to earn immortality as a result of his own unique gifts. His creative work is at the same time the expression of his heroism and the justification of it. It is his "private religion"—as Rank put it. Its uniqueness gives him personal immortality; it is his own "beyond" and not that of others.

There's also a funny point in the book where it reduces everything down to some kind of religion:

Regarding your question about what you should tell your children: my answer is similar to what @Undisciplined said. I think you should tell them what you believe in and give them the space to find what they believe in. You could try to tell them what you told us here. It doesn't have to be all at once; it could happen slowly over many years.

1. Not my words, but from a review of the book. I liked them very much. So much, in fact, I added them as a quote on my website. ↩