Ephemeral

Do you know who your great great great grandmother was?  All sixteen of them?  How about your great great great grandfathers?  And are you sure?

We humans keep forgetting how ephemeral we are.  I think it was easier to realize that when life expectancy (real life expectancy, not statistics, as in “how does does someone from your class/region/mode of life expect to live?  As in, what they used for Social Security was gamed that way because you were not likely to collect even ten years of it. ...