Ron Chau on Mindful Death Awareness and Values
Ron Chau is a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at the University of Arizona, where he also minors in health psychology. He earned his MA at University of Arizona, his BA (First Class Honors) at University of Melbourne, and his Graduate Diploma at Australian National University. Prior to his psychology career, Ron earned a Bachelor’s in Arts and Bachelor’s in Economics at University of Western Australia, and worked as a public policy analyst at the Australian Treasury and Dept. of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. Ron’s research interests lie at the intersection of existential, clinical, and positive psychology, with a focus on how existential concerns might promote meaning making and personal growth. Ron has won numerous scholarships and awards, including the American Australian Association Graduate Education Scholarship, UWA SWANS Scholarship, Ormond College John Leaper Scholarship, and the Dr. Elizabeth L. Glitsky Endowed Fellowship.
Ron on the web: UA Grad page | Facebook | Instagram
By Kenneth Vail, Cleveland State University. August 4, 2021.
ISSEP: How did you first become aware of and interested in existentialism and existential psychology?
Ron Chau: Even as a kid, I was always interested in the big questions about existence and the meaning of life. I remember being perplexed with what it meant to actually be alive, to have consciousness or not, and what happens after we die. I was also raised Catholic and remember wanting to be a priest, to facilitate the kind of spiritual union between persons that I loved hearing about at mass. As I got older, I was always telling people they should live their lives to the fullest, and try to make a positive impact on the world, because you never know when you’re going to die. The idea of finding my meaning and purpose in life was always super important to me. I started off doing engineering, because I wanted to help shift to renewable energy; then I developed an appreciation for social issues and progressive politics; and a few iterations later (2011) I went to University of Arizona to study political philosophy.
That’s when I had my car accident. Some friends and I had been driving to Las Vegas for a buck’s party (stag/bachelor party). It was a sunny day in Arizona, we were listening to the Gin Blossoms. My friend was driving and I was in the passenger seat. He must have bumped the median, because suddenly we ricocheted off into the sand dunes. The last thing I remember thinking was: “we’ll be fine; we’ll just slow down in the sand.” But the next moment, the door was open and a nurse was asking me my name and the date. I got my name right, but got the year wrong. My friend told me, later, that I looked like I was holding a jug of blood and just pouring it out on the sand. The ambulance would have been too slow, apparently, so they airlifted me to the hospital.
The whole time all of this was happening, I remember being quite pleased with myself, thinking “I knew this would happen someday! I knew we should all love and live our lives to the fullest! We just never know when it might all end. See—this is what can happen!” I was thankful that I had followed that advice myself and I was satisfied with how I had lived my life up to that point. I remember thinking, “Okay, if this is it, then it’ll be okay. I’ve lived a full, good life. I’m ready to let my consciousness go and give myself up to fate. I can’t control this.”
Obviously, I didn’t die. But the first night alone in ICU was terrifying—I didn’t know if I would walk again, or recover from my traumatic brain injury, or even if I might suddenly die. I pondered what the point of life is given it is full of suffering and uncertainty. I had so much philosophical training, and was contemplating writing a huge dissertation to argue that a person’s beliefs and ideas formed the basis of the meaning of life. But nothing so logical was sustaining a sense of meaning in that moment. Then, I remembered my mom—her face, her smile, her cute button nose, and I was moved to tears. No further justification for the meaning of life was needed in that moment.
Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Sartre, and an artistic depiction of Siddhartha Gautama—the Buddha.
After I got out of the ICU, I returned to Australia and took a gap year to recuperate. But, my gap year didn’t involve traveling the world, as many Australians do. Instead, I spent the year at home, thinking about life and the meaning of it all. I read a lot of existentialist works—Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Dostoyevsky, but also a lot of Buddhist stuff about mindfulness. When I emerged from that, I left academic philosophy and took up work in the Australian public service. But, I also took night classes in psychology, with the idea that I wanted to become a therapist and counselor. It was in my social psych courses that I encountered terror management theory and the science of existential psychology, more broadly, which really spoke to me.
So, I quit my job and volunteered for 6 months as a research assistant. My two biggest interests were consciousness and meaning in life questions. Thus, I first joined a lab working on integrated information theory, which posits that consciousness is correlated with certain physical states in the universe. But I spent all my time in a windowless room programming MATLAB code, which didn’t feel particularly connected to the world. So I went to the University of Sydney, to explore terror management theory with Ilan Dar Nimrod. That was really engaging to me, so I decided to pursue clinical psychology and wanted to blend it with the science of existential psychology. I applied to a variety of programs where it was possible to combine those interests, and—funnily enough—was accepted into University of Arizona again. So, after coming here for philosophy and suffering a near-fatal car crash here 10 years ago, I’m back—this time, to pursue clinical and existential psychology!
ISSEP: How did that experience affect your research interests?
Ron Chau: I’ve always been mindful of the fleeting nature of existence and tried to live my life as if it could end at any moment. I think that helped me to try to do the most with every precious moment I have while I’m here, and ultimately helped me get to the point where I felt satisfied with my life even in the face of death. Following my car accident, I started to wonder: if people were more mindful of how fleeting life really is, would they live their lives differently?
While I was taking my gap year, I learned Western existentialism and Eastern traditions, such as Buddhism, each have interesting things to say about being impermanent beings saddled with the problem of what to do with ourselves while we’re here. So, I began to look more closely at the literature on mindfulness and conscious death contemplation. There isn’t a lot of quantitative research on the topic, but a lot of proverbial cultural wisdom and even some formal theory seemed to point in that direction.
As an economist (my previous career), I often think about how humans allocate their scarce resources, with the most valuable and scarce resource being time. But human psychology is complicated. Research on terror management theory and socioemotional selectivity theory has shown that, most of the time, the concept of death is indeed experienced as an existential psychological threat—but it’s experienced as an abstract concept that we non-consciously “manage” by participating in and defending our cultural systems that offer to mitigate our existential concern by offering long-term time horizons (e.g., enduring cultural legacies, afterlives).
Perhaps as a result of that sort of defensive mitigation, much less frequently do we attend to death as a concrete reality that tangibly limits us to shorter time horizons. It seems like we only consciously appreciate the concrete realities of death when we face it directly—maybe as soldiers on a battlefield, or survivors of near-fatal car accidents, or as we get older and more fully appreciate that our time is likely soon coming to an end. When that happens, research shows, people adopt a shorter time horizon and tend to prioritize goals with shorter-term payoffs—adjusting social goals and spending their limited time deepening their more positive and fulfilling relationships.
So, I began to ask whether practicing a more mindful awareness of death could similarly prompt people to adjust their social and cultural goals in ways that would give their life deeper meaning.
ISSEP: Your research has studied the impact of daily contemplations of death. Can you tell us more about that?
Ron Chau: Sure! I brought participants into the lab for a longitudinal between-subjects experiment. I randomly assigned each participant to one of two conditions: (1) in the control condition, we prompted them to think and write about their life in general; but (2) in the target condition, we prompted them to think and write about the fact that they’re going to die someday. Then, I used quantitative surveys to measure mindfulness, life priorities (self-determination theory’s “aspirations index”), life satisfaction, meaning in life, and a variety of other interesting measures such as gratitude, appreciation of art (Van Gogh and Monet paintings), and things like that. And I did these prompts and measurements with them in the lab during an initial in-person session; then, every day for 14 days, we sent them a text and an email prompting them to write about their life in general (control condition) or their inevitable personal death (target condition) affects the way they think and feel about life (e.g., family, friends, sunsets). Then I had them come back to the lab after the 14 day repeated contemplation period, and then again a month later for a final session, to complete the set of prompts and measurements mentioned above. So, in each condition, there were three lab sessions with similar prompts and measurements over a 6-week period.
The data patterns were super interesting! First, the data showed that—compared to the control condition—repeatedly consciously thinking about death was associated with increased mindfulness. Second, we found it was also associated with a decreased valuation of “extrinsic” goals; these are goals for things that aren’t inherently psychologically nourishing or meaningful, but are culturally valuable such as wealth, fame, and stylish clothes. And third, we also found that it was correlated with increased reports of life satisfaction and meaning in life in those who also became more mindful over the daily diary period.
Those data patterns are exactly what the available theory, and the cultural wisdom, had predicted. But before anybody gets too carried away with those patterns, it’s a good idea to be cautious and wait for some replication. Some of the other patterns on the other well-being measures suggest all that glitters is not gold, so we need to make sure the patterns weren’t spurious. And even if the above patterns are replicated, the effect sizes were modest—meaning that although repeated death contemplation was impactful, it was hardly a life-changing event. As is usually the case, more research is necessary!
ISSEP: In what ways can your research help us make sense of important human experiences, better understand important events, or inform our cultural or technological trends?
Ron Chau: With agriculture and industrialization, our society became hyper-specialized. The pro is that most of us in the developed world are now more free to pursue what we want without much consideration of other topics; the aspiring soccer player is now free to focus entirely on soccer instead of things like farming techniques, civil engineering, and meteorology. But the con is that such specialization can also lead to compartmentalization and alienation; we might not really think about the practical realities of human things like singing, or dancing, or dying anymore because that sort of stuff is handled by specialized singers, and dancers, and morticians. The effect is that, for many of us, the fleeting nature of existence is often simply an abstract concept in the background of our minds and we rarely give it any direct conscious attention, except for, perhaps, the occasional funeral or traumatic near-death experience.
One problem with that is we can quickly lose sight of what really matters in life. However, I see at least two trends where people may engage in mindful death contemplation. First, people may find the practical realities of mortality and suffering unintentionally brought home in a prolonged way, such as it was during the COVID-19 pandemic, which may inadvertently cause them to re-evaluate and adjust their life priorities. Second, people are exploring the possibilities of intentionally facilitating a more mindful awareness of our mortality for the purposes of staying grounded and making the most out of the time we have. That latter trend is illustrated by things such as (a) the emergence of so-called “death cafés” in which people gather for casual conversations about existential realities, and (b) the emergence of smartphone apps such as Finitude, WeCroak, and others that estimate the user’s expected lifespan, send users reminders of their time left, and give customized tips for making the most of it.
ISSEP: You’ve been studying these issues using psychological science. Do you see your research topic being dealt with in interesting ways in the humanities or the arts?
Ron Chau: Definitely! Actually, I’m currently focused on developing an existential narrative therapy. Oftentimes logical, scientific analysis can feel a bit cold and difficult to connect with at an emotional level in the therapy room. But one thing that literature has demonstrated over and over is that people really connect well with the personal truths of life narratives. So I’m super interested in how cultural narratives of tragedy and redemption might help people better understand and navigate their existential situations.
Clockwise from top left: Portrait of Leo Tolstoy, by Ilya Repin (1887); Tolstoy’s The death of Ivan Ilyich (1886); Tolstoy’s War and peace (1869); and Dostoyevsky’s The brothers Karamazov (1879)
Some great classic examples are seen in nearly every Shakespeare play—"to be or not to be” and all that. But also Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), in which a high court judge has been living a rather unexamined life, focused on work and climbing the social ladder. He develops a mysterious illness and dies a slow and agonizing death, which symbolizes the tragedy of living without meaning. Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869) tells the story of a young man who began as a nihilistic character, experienced a close brush with death, and subsequently underwent a redemptive transformation toward a more meaningful life. And, of course, Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1879) masterfully illustrates all sorts of existential narratives such as the pursuit of intellectual stoicism and progressive values, or the desperate attempt to control and extract as much pleasure as possible from life, or the radical acceptance of reality (with all its suffering) through love and compassion.
ISSEP: You’ve attended, and presented research at, our Existential Psychology Conferences; how has your experience been with those?
Ron Chau: I attended the conferences in Portland [2019] and New Orleans [2020] and had an absolutely wonderful time! Each time it was so well-organized and had an exceptional lineup of speakers. It was so great to see existential psychology being studied in such a rigorous, quantitative, and scientific way. I also really enjoyed chatting with the presenters and other leading scholars, and meeting other graduate students interested in empirically researching existential psychotherapy—I thought I was the only one before this conference! It’s so great to see this field coming together. I highly recommend it!
ISSEP: What is one piece of advice you would give to future students who have an interest in following in your footsteps?
Ron Chau: Be honest with yourself about what you want from life, in your career or otherwise. It would be a terrible irony to study existential psychology as merely part of the rat race, alienated from your true self. So, think about what you want out of life, and what you really care about, and pursue the science of existential psychology (or whatever else matters to you) only if it’s an authentic and meaningful expression of yourself.
Also, consider multimethod techniques. Think about how you might harness the richness of more holistic qualitative analyses alongside the more quantitative methods that can help identify systematic patterns of experiences and behaviors in large samples of relevant populations. Each of these methods have different strengths and weaknesses, and a multimethod approach would help in developing a well-rounded science of existential psychology.
ISSEP: Can you tell us a little about yourself outside the research context?
Ron Chau: I love to meditate and be mindful, and I like going into nature and hiking. Basically anything to get back into my conscious experience, paying attention to the moment, and feeling alive with a sense of awe and appreciation of the beauty of life.
On a related note, I love to sing! When I was a kid, my dad and I would go to Sunday market and we’d listen to Ricky Nelson tapes along the way. In primary school, I sang in choir and made head choir boy. In high school and college, I got really into karaoke, which meant I built a whole repertoire of Backstreet Boys songs from the 1990s.
When I arrived back at University of Arizona, I auditioned for an a cappella group on campus. I got in, started taking lessons, and it’s been great ever since! Our a cappella group is called Noteriety and it’s so much fun. We recently won quarterfinals at the ICCAs (International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella—think Pitch Perfect) and won awards for best soloist, best choreography, best vocal percussion, and best musical arrangement. Our latest album is called Resilience, and you can check out our videos on YouTube and listen to our music on Spotify, Apple Music, and so on.
When it comes to karaoke, songs from movies are good, with my faves being Shallow or Always Remember Us This Way from A Star is Born, City of Stars from La La Land, and a ton of songs from The Greatest Showman (but especially Never Enough). You can’t go wrong with Backstreet Boys, NSYNC, Taylor Swift, Bon Jovi, or Aerosmith, with my personal favorites being Backstreet Boys’ Shape Of My Heart and I Want It That Way, Bon Jovi’s Livin' On A Prayer, and my favorite night-ender Aerosmith’s I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing.