By the end of this book, if not before, you may come to have a fuller appreciation of some of your central beliefs about yourself, and some of your related attitudes. In particular, you may come to realize more fully that, even as you yourself most deeply believe, after several more decades at most, you will cease to exist, completely and forever. In the light of this awareness, and according to your deepest values, perhaps you will make the most of your quite limited existence.

Peter Unger, Identity, Consciousness, and Value, New York, 1990, p. 3