We may experience existential dread when we confront mortality, isolation, and loss of meaning.

Music therapy has demonstrated efficacy in managing intense emotions such as anxiety and depression.

Music allows us to feel authentic and vulnerable as we explore existential dread in a controlled environment.

Music can help us recognize that existential dread can be a source of connection rather than isolation.

Existential dread is a deep sense of sadness and even terror that can arise when we struggle to understand our existence, such as our mortality, feelings of isolation, and a perceived lack of meaning in our lives. Because existential dread can be so intense, we may avoid or suppress our feelings, which often worsens rather than improves our dread. Further, we may be hesitant to seek support for fear of being stigmatized for struggling with our mental health. As a result, we often fall into a spiral of avoidance and isolation, with no real answers as to how to understand and cope with this dread.

In these moments, when we feel alone and trapped, many people turn to music. Music is often the first place where we learn to experience and understand our feelings. And research indicates that engagement with music, particularly in the form of music therapy, can help us manage a range of painful emotional experiences.

How can music help us manage our existential dread? For many of us, music empathically reflects the depths of our darkness and pain. It helps us not avoid these feelings, but rather to validate and process overwhelming existential dread.

To better understand this process, I spoke with Grammy-nominated artist Moby about the powerful and compelling remake of his song “When It’s Cold I’d Like to Die” (with Jacob Lusk) on his new album Future Quiet. Moby felt that our existential dread is one of our darkest and most painful emotional experiences. “As humans, we'll never know the truth of existence. All we know is our reaction to it,” Moby told me. “I have this idea, and I think it's shared with most people; there is the void, the void of darkness, and it is a scary place. It's a bleak place. And you could argue almost everything we do is avoiding the void."

Moby explained that this avoidance is often futile, as the reality of issues such as mortality, isolation, and loss of meaning catches up to us eventually. "We can avoid the void until it finally claims us at the end," Moby explained. "But maybe fighting against it is simply a fool's errand, and it might just be a more interesting use of a life to examine it."

He referenced Herman Melville's Moby Dick as a cautionary tale on what happens when we avoid our existential dread. "The central metaphor of Moby Dick is Ahab, who hates the idea that the universe doesn't look like his idea of what the universe should look like," he described. "And Moby Dick represents the unknowable forces of the universe. Ahab, obviously, is destroyed trying to fight the forces of the universe rather than sort of just examining them."

Moby feels that one of the main reasons that we avoid rather than confront existential dread is that we live in a culture that does not value vulnerability and authenticity. Yet music can be a world where authenticity and vulnerability are shared and even celebrated. "There's not a lot in our upbringing and culture that encourages us to discover that vulnerable self in an authentic way and to connect with it," Moby said. "We live in a world where people don't express their vulnerability publicly. And when you encounter authenticity in music, it's like, 'Oh, this is a microcosm of what things should be.'"

One of the most difficult aspects of our struggle with existential dread is that we fear that our feelings will overwhelm and consume us. Moby suggests that listening to music allows us to dive into those feelings in a controlled manner. "The other aspect that I think is so incredibly, self-evidently powerful is the agency aspect of it. One of the things that causes me to experience anxiety, despair, or depression is the lack of agency in the world," he described. "And when we engage with music, we're controlling. We're hitting play on Spotify, or we're hitting play on a CD or something. And that agency makes it such a contained, controlled experience. And I think that's why people can go to very dark places with music. Because they know the experience can be ended just by hitting the pause button."

As a result, music can help us break the cycle of avoidance and allow us to safely confront our existential dread. Paradoxically, the more he was able to accept the challenge of looking into the darkness of existential dread, the more he was able to consider alternative conceptualizations. One of his conclusions was that the void of mortality is part of the cycle of life. "And so about 15 years ago, I was like, 'What's in the void?'" he questioned. "And I started thinking, maybe we've been thinking about this all wrong. All the problems come from avoiding whatever the void might be, rather than actually saying, 'Maybe it's actually a source of healing, and it's a source of life.' Even when there's death, the death is necessary to create new life."

As a result, he has become convinced that music is a vehicle for this ongoing exploration. "Music can be a remarkable way of experiencing intense light and intense darkness at the same time."

Further, music can teach us that our feelings of existential dread may not isolate us, but actually unite us. And that universal experience through music can be a source of connection rather than isolation. “Within that exploration is looking at age, looking at mortality, looking at health, looking at loss, looking at experience," Moby said. "It builds a compassionate commonality. 'Oh, we're all struggling with it.'"

© Psychology Today