[WJL]

I've got degrees is Psych and Philosophy, so as you might imagine I've had to consider these issues a bit.

I was big into Existential Psychology, which has as one of its tenets that the fear of non-existence is perhaps the most fundamental building block of the psyche, and many human behaviors are responses to dealing with the fear of death. I'm not going to go deeply into this, but one of the most poignant things I came across was that without death, the moments of our life have no value. If you lived forever, any particular moment has no particular value, because we would have an infinite number of them. The fact that we are beings who are going to die puts a value on every moment we live, because we only have a limited number of them. When we are young, it seems there is a near infinity of time before us, but as we age, we realize that each passing moment is more important than the last, and we really don't know how many more we'll have. The earlier in life you become aware of this fact, the less time you will waste on things that are petty, cruel, and pointless, because you don't have time for these things. Surround yourself with good people and don't waste any time on people who don't give a s*** about you. Do what you love, and do it with the best you have as much as you can, and you will find those actions have a peculiar power that gives meaning to those moments. A life without meaning is no life at all, and when the big yellow bus comes for you, you want to look back at that last moment and feel 'I did it'.