Thanks to science and capitalism, we have been able to push back this limit ourselves. In 1840, the average lifespan in the most capitalist countries was under 40 years old. By WW2, it reached 60 years. Now it has almost reached 80 years and is growing exponentially. In ancient times, we simply did not have the time to consider the problem of death from a detached, conceptual perspective; it was omnipresent and inescapable.
Despite these modern accomplishments, few people grasp the implications of death. Some people do think about death. Mexicans, for instance, celebrate the Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), a remembrance of our dead relatives and a celebration of life. So is the Pagan Samhain and, at least in the past, our Halloween. But North American society tries very hard to ignore death.
Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.
W. Somerset Maugham
Instead, we concoct all kinds of pseudo-sciences to delude ourselves into extending our lives. People take all kind of quack products, from human growth hormone (HGH) to ergogenic aids. It runs the gamut from credible-looking pseudo-science to downright lunacy. For example, the most famous Internet crackpot, Alex Chiu, promotes his "eternal life devices". Whatever their doctrine and motives, they all seek to cash in on our inherent desire to live longer.
We also elaborate ideologies to delude ourselves that we are immortal. The most emotional argument for following a religion is probably this promise of "eternal life". In fact, the belief in the "soul" is sustained solely by this desire, as medical science, mental problems, and what we observe in accidents and drug use, have all disproved conclusively and beyond doubt that the mind is material. Of course the notion of immateriality itself is meaningless; we cannot define what it would mean for the mind to be immaterial anyway.
The notion of the afterlife is similarly problematic. The very notion of a "life after death" is contradictory, since death is the end of life. But even if we accept this as possible, the impossibility of the soul makes an immaterial afterlife impossible, and even materially we have no evidence that the mind can detach itself from the body at death, as the two are inextricably linked. Furthermore, all notion of an afterlife have profound problems as they relate to personal identity.
