Not only is death anxiety real, but it is people's most profound source of concern. This anxiety is so intense that it generates many if not all of the specific fears and phobias people experience in everyday life. Fears of being alone or in a confined space, for example, are fears whose connections with death anxiety are relatively easy to trace, but so are the needs for bright lights and noise. It is more comfortable, more in keeping with one's self-image, to transform the underlying anxiety into a variety of smaller aversions.

According to Becker, much of people's daily behavior consists of attempts to deny death and thereby keep their basic anxiety under control. People would have a difficult time controlling their anxiety, though, if alarming realities continued to intrude and if they were exposed to brutal reminders of their vulnerability. Becker also suggested that this is where society plays its role. No function of society is more crucial than its strengthening of individual defenses against death anxiety. Becker's analysis of society convinced him that many beliefs and practices are in the service of death denial, that is, reducing the experience of anxiety. Funeral homes with their flowers and homilies, and the medical system with its evasions, are only among the more obvious societal elements that join with individuals to maintain the fiction that there is nothing to fear.