Hide & Seek with Mistress Death

"I'm figurin on livin t'be 'bout a hundr'd an fifty.
When I was a young kid, i c'n r'member seem like people only live to be about 60 or 70;
80 was old;
today you got people livin ovah hundr'd. So, by the time I get close to a hundr'd, people gonna be livin to be a hundr'd an fifty, I figure.
Butchya nevah know.
I mean, accidents happen.
Lightnin might strike in a little while.
Y'nevah know.
...
But as far as Nature goes? If I can stay away from all the drunks,
the crazy people...,
I'll live to be an ooold man.
Real old.
Trust me."
-Wild Bill Treagle,
Alligator wrangler.

With all our fancy schmancy and high-falutin', why the hell we plan on dying so young? Why do we think we've gotta lie down in front of our genetics and beg for mercy? Why do we try fighting our body's own aging with Pills and Treatments and Cures that ain't doin anything but pandering to our scruff-necked paranoia? Why's it such a big leap to figure that, if our bodies have evolved in (re)markable ways, our brains have probably evolved right along with us? Why does acknowledging the freakasaurus mightiness of our mental faculties, acknowledging their ability to meet our genetic proclivities head-on a truly level playing field, seem like such a grand act of ignorant faith? Why does it still have a ring of the fundamentalist snake-handler to it?

Why are we so unwilling to accept that we're capable of a hell of a lot more cool stuff than we've been led to believe?

Why do we, docile as the hopelessly brainwashed, accept the idea that we've gotta die too young to have really understood anything?

Why do we think we can't live forever?

We're fatalists who won't admit we're fatalists.
We're terrified of our own power ("god within us" isn't s'posed to be literal).
We're scared to wake up to the next dream.
We're too fucked up and too fuckin wonderful for me to sort out before my coffeeshift starts,
but think about this:
We have more control than we think.

Way more.

An' sweet Mistrees Death just sittin there grinnin,
waitin for us to figure it out.