There's probably some fundamental, evolutionary, genetic reason why we need to live so long and have young and they need to continue the whole shebang and thus forth into a small eternity, but just so that we wouldn't be bored, nature decided to hand us consciousness and thought 'let them have fun these 5o or 1oo years'... What we do with it is entirely up to us. The need to act like animals half the time and petrified of passing the other half is incidental. We're given these moments and they're just for us. Nothing hysterically global about it - just our own personal little 'inside looking out'.