Try to imagine not existing. We can't. Every attempt still has us in it, watching the nothing from somewhere. The mind cannot conceive of its own absence. There is always an observer. We are permanently locked inside experience and the exit door is unimaginable from the inside.
And that is where the panic lives. Because we cannot conceive of the end, we become obsessed with decorating the interior. We cannot look at the exit so we stare at the walls. We become master decorators of the interval.
So we have eighty years of this (if lucky). Eighty years of the most inexplicable thing in the known universe, a pocket of experience inside an indifferent mathematical system that has no business feeling like anything from the inside, and yet does.
And some people get to choose exactly how they spend it. Complete freedom. Infinite options. And they spend it in boardrooms talking about market share because the machine they built absorbed their identity so completely that stepping off feels like dying. They built a cage, polished it until it looked like purpose, and stayed.
But that is just the visible version of what almost everyone does.
Religion figured this out first. Tell people this life is a waiting room, a prologue, a test before the real thing begins. The promise of eternity devalues the present completely. Why feel the full strange weight of being alive right now when infinite time is coming later. The deferral feels sacred. The clock keeps running.
Secularism arrived and changed nothing fundamental. The revolution replaced heaven. The mission replaced salvation. Ideological movements, productivity culture, militantism, they all run the same code underneath. They hand us an identity larger than ourselves, a future worth sacrificing the present for, a community that rewards the forgetting and makes the amnesia feel noble. We stay busy, we stay inside the story, we stay anesthetized, and it feels like meaning.
The finitude sits underneath all of it, patient, indifferent to whatever narrative you were using.