I remember where in one of Vonnegut's books, he describes life not as some fixed end-result in time to be celebrated or mourned, but a process, something you could visualize as a roughly drawn line taking all sorts of directions through time, alongside other lines, often interacting with some of them, creating effects, and finally terminating.

I suppose, in some sense, it's not far off from our idea of a process running on a computer, often interacting with other processes, launching other processes, eventually terminating.

Taking that further, one way to look at this is that life is really a process, running on our software (genetic code), which we have some control over (somehow). We literally are code that writes code, albeit very slowly, over generations. And perhaps that what we really want is to able to look back at what we've etched into this big computer's (i.e. the world's shared) memory and be proud of it.