I have some sympathy for your philosophy, but clearly it's important to have a reasonable amount of memory and preservation, and to have some degree of control over it. What we're facing seems like a rather random, senseless erosion of those things.
You mention physics. A constant in our universe is that things decay unless actively maintained. All life is fight against entropy. Trying to preserve things is only natural.
We put priority on benefits we can realize. Short term benefits are easier to realize, and decisions made in the moment, absent malicious intent, make sense in the moment. Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20. We make a prediction now what will be important later, sometimes we are right, sometimes we are wrong. Perfection is impossible, and even if it weren't, it would not be worth the cost of trying to attain it.