I have fairly often seen it asserted in the products of modern mass media the idea, intended to be consoling, that we 'live-on' in the memories of those who live after we have died.
Strangely, this is often put-forward as if it was believed to be some kind of original insight, a notion that other people might not have stumbled across; apparently assuming that we moderns have discovered this (purportedly) new and satisfying form of life beyond our personal death...
Wheras the reality is surely that almost everybody who has given a moments thought to the matter has had this idea and rejected it because it is so obviously unsatifactory!
For a start, people who knew us and live-on may not actually think much (or at all) about us, they will surely misremember (with gaps and distortions), or have mostly unpleasant thoughts. And anyway sooner-or-later - naturally - they themselves will all die; and before long all traces of 'biological' memory of our-selves will be utterly lost from among the living.
So, what is death? How do we really feel about it?
From what one can read in old books and from recollections of early childhood, it seems that we are (once we have reached some years old - four or five?) born with some innate understanding that we ourselves will die and be lost from this mortal world.
In other words, there really is a thing called death, and - from the perspective of the living-world - it really is an end to our everyday selves.
Also that death really is a Big Thing. All attempts at reassurance by saying that our lives are trivial or that we are not personally present at our own deaths etc. are beside the point. We all know that death is real, and know that in some important way (or more than one way) death is a terrible loss.
On the other side (and again going on what past people wrote, as well as the spontaneous apparently-inborn understandings of childhood) there has always been a traditional wisdom that death is not the end.
Up to now (i.e. very recently in history) there seems a broad agreement, a human consensus: death is real, death is a loss; something comes after...
But it is at this point that opinions begin to vary; and vary widely. It is a further consensus that death is a transition - but transition to what?
Some-thing survives death; but what that 'thing' may be, and what condition it survives in, varies in many ways including rebirth into another human, or animal; loss of the self and reabsorption into divine spirit; a witless wandering ghost; a blissful spirit, or a suffering one; a person in permanent paradise, or one that is stuck in some eternally recurring cycle - and so on. Or the Christian Heaven.
Many ideas.
But modern Man has decided that these are all false and that death is an annihilation.
This means that a typical modern Man understands his life as being bounded by birth and death with nothing on either side.
This further means that modern Man is in an unique position of trying to make sense of his mortal life without any reference to anything outside. He is trying to live a life he 'knows' to be temporary and with nothing left-behind; and he is trying to make sense out of it: trying to discover (on this basis) some purpose, some reason for being.
He is trying to discover why to be moral - indeed whether to be moral because - why anything?
Modern Man is, indeed, faced by the question of, on such terms and with such constraints, whether life is worth having At All?
So far, the 'best' answer to this question seems to be that life is worth living if it is pleasurable here-and-now (or maybe the confident expectation that it soon will be) - but otherwise... Why Bother?
And it is on this slender and feeble basis that billions of modern Men are supposed-to get up every morning, work and do stuff, be nice/ kind/ compassionate to everybody, fall in love, raise a family, build and maintain a community/ a nation/ civilization; be a useful citizen...
Considering this; it is no surprise that the developed world is not just collapsing; but actively destroying-itself.
No surprise that life has become a progressive societal suicide.
After all, there is no reason for it not to be.
