A Meditation upon the Nature of Endings, the Presumption of Labels, and the Philosophical Status of Fermented Milk
Humans have attempted not to die for the entire duration of recorded history. The Egyptians mummified their dead in the hope of preserving them for an afterlife. The Chinese emperors dispatched expeditions to find the elixir of immortality; several of those emperors then died of mercury poisoning, which they thought was the elixir. Ponce de León sailed across an ocean looking for a fountain of youth and found Florida, which, whatever its merits, is not the same thing.
The result is that humans in general have come to accept, with solemn magnanimity, the thermodynamic gradient of inevitable decay.