“The husband and wife who sacrifice their own ambitions and their material assets in order to provide ‘a better future’ for their children, the soldier who risks his life, or perhaps consciously sacrifices it, in battle, the man who devotes his life to some struggle for ‘his people’ that cannot possibly be won in his lifetime, people (or most of them) who buy life insurance or leave wills, and, for that matter, most women upon becoming pregnant for the first time, are people who conceive of themselves,  however unconsciously, as part of a great biological stream. Just as something of their ancestors lives on in them, so will something of them live on in their children, or in their people, their race, their community—for childless people, too, conduct their lives and try to arrange their postmortem affairs with concern for how the great stream is going to flow on. Most people, historically, have not lived their lives as if thinking, ‘I have only one life to live.’ Instead they have lived as if they are living their ancestors‘ lives and their offspring’s lives and perhaps their neighbors’ lives as well. They have seen themselves as inseparable from the great tide of chromosomes of which they are created and which they pass on. The mere fact that you were only going to be here a short time and would be dead soon enough did not give you the license to try to climb out of the stream and change the natural order of things. The Chinese, in ancestor worship, have literally worshiped the great tide itself, and not any god or gods. For anyone to renounce the notion of serial immortality, in the West or the East, has been to defy what seems like a law of Nature. ”  

— Tom Wolfe, 1976