If we want to make sense of our days, if we want to fill them with something more purposeful than mere existence, if we wrestle with our own significance and insignificance, that is because we are conscious of our own impermanence. Myth, religion and philosophy have arisen from the need to reckon with our awareness of mortality. We have created fables of the world’s origins, of the afterlife and of eternity in order to imagine measures of time larger than our own and to counteract the fears of our own ending.
