The human mind is made up of 3 aspects: the Ego, the Id, and the SuperEgo. The term Ego is not being used in the sense of narcissism, rather in the perspective of self interest required for survival. The interests required for survival is commonly known as the psychological hierarchy of needs. With the top of the hierarchy embodying ones innermost desires and dreams, the very final point on this hierarchy is known as "self transcendence". This phenomenon becomes known once an individual starts to transcend focus of attention from self interested needs into ideas that extend beyond the individual. This can be seen with people desiring to create a legacy for themselves to leave behind, or working towards leaving behind a legacy of a specific idea logical perspective or organization. Self transcendence is usually intended to act as a form of immortality that extends beyond the life of the physical body.

While this is a perfectly legitimate perspective which has contributed to what we call culture and civilization, a great crisis of our time threatens all of this. Since the collective efforts of individuals who have transcended their individual selves in building greater ambitions like cultures and civilizations are the combined efforts of billions of previously existing humans. This is a form of immortality that they have striven for, even if we don't directly remember their efforts in particular, is at risk of destruction. Should the human species ever destroy itself through conflict such as a nuclear exchange, or by forces of nature like climate change or extraterrestrial impacts; then this collected effort will swiftly end. Not only will past existing humans be disrupted, the billions of humans currently existing will have wasted all of their efforts to preserve their own self transcendence.

People who work their lives towards the efforts of something greater than themselves today must acknowledge that, if the human species does not survive, their immortality in the legacy of their work will cease. Everything that human civilization is is built upon all the work of millennia and eons of biological and cultural evolution which would end with the extinction of the species. While not everyone has the same philosophical intentions, the simple acts of our lives impact the momentum of the collective human mental progression of culture and civilization. If we don't check ourselves as a species and don't drastically and rapidly reorganize our civilization, everything we have been spending our lives doing will have been wasted.

Everyone is caught up in their own bubble world of existence where their perception and focus is largely angled in the direction of their own desires, needs, and wants. While it is not necessarily negative for everyone to have this mentality, we must come to terms that it is an obsolete and immature model that is too narrow for the 21st-century and its challenges. If the human species is to survive we must all strive to self transcend to the greatest extent of our own self focus. And embrace a much greater scale of perception that looks out for, and includes, the greater society and ecosystem in which we humans interact within. Our unification on the basic logical and rational basis to preserve the human species is a responsibility that we all must take; and will become an error and mistake that we will be held accountable, should we fail.