Science, technology & increasingly abundant material goods have created a common global culture in which this trinity—“sci-tech-mat” for short—serves the terror management roles formerly played by religion. Beyond merely distracting us from our fear of existing as mortal beings who know we are going to die, ideas built on science & technology have been extended to what look remarkably like traditional religions. This includes possibilities of afterlives, immortality, or at least something headed in that direction. For “eternal life” we cling to advances in medical technology. For “heaven” we put our hopes in the “cloud,” meaning storing some imaginary essence of who we are in a future digital, electronic eternity. Unfortunately none of these can extinguish the underlying existential fear, & they all suffer from the same cognitive dissonance as traditional religions, since they ask us to take something on faith based on insufficient evidence. They are just more failed efforts at terror management. Gotama’s method involves learning to let go of unwholesome feelings, fears, & runaway ideas about our inevitable death, rather than creating newer & equally unhelpful ones.