so you're having an existential crisis

Religions, Political Ideologies, and Sports Teams all provide us with sturdy hero systems where participation ensures symbolic immortality.

Religion may promise an afterlife allowing us to manage our death anxiety and continue to deny it.

The corporate success ladder tells us that financial success or career competence will symbolically protect us from death.

Having kids can be seen as an attempt to transcend our biological mortality an attempt to extend our genetic lineage to keep a little bit of us still going.

Society has always been a symbolic action system. A structure of status and roles, customs and rules of behavior, designed to serve as a vehicle for earthy heroism. 

We care about ourselves above all else cuz we like to see ourselves as heroes to prove that we count in face of the void. This is measured by our self-worth. The motivating force behind narcissism. 

So we attach ourselves so firmly to the world of symbols of work, religion, social games, and so forth. 

Our denial of death and hero systems that emerge as defense allows us to justify great acts of evil.