Professor Clay Routledge joins Eldon to discuss the existential nature of human beings. We are all fully aware of our fragility, transience, and potential cosmic insignificance. Our ability to ponder the big questions about death and meaning and the anxiety that these questions can provoke have motivated us to be a species not only concerned about survival, but also about our significance. Supernatural is a book of apparent contradictions, insightfully reconciled.

Dr. Clay Routledge is an author, psychological scientist, consultant, public speaker, and professor. He studies basic psychological needs and how these needs influence wellbeing, physical health, and intergroup relations. Much of his research focuses on the need for meaning in life. More specifically, his research explores individual differences in the need for meaning, the underlying cognitive processes involved in meaning-making, the different ways people seek and maintain meaning, how the presence or absence of meaning influences health, wellbeing, social bonds, self-control, and goal pursuit, and how threats related to meaning impact intergroup relations.

He has published over 100 scholarly papers, co-edited two books on existential psychology, and authored the books Nostalgia: A Psychological Resource and Supernatural: Death, Meaning, and the Power of the Invisible World. He was the lead writer for the TED-Ed animated lesson Why Do We Feel Nostalgia?

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