This is the curse of consciousness. We all know we are going to die. No other organism is burdened with the enormity of the conscious knowledge that it has a finite lifetime and that its individual existence is eventually and inevitably coming to an end. No creature, whether a bacterium, an ant, a rhododendron, or a salmon, “cares” or even “knows” about dying; they live and they die, participating in the continual struggle for existence by propagating their genes into future generations and playing the endless game of the survival of the fittest.
