John N. Gray

The search for meaning comes with awareness of death, which is a product of human self-consciousness. Fearing their lives ending, human beings invented religions and philosophies in which the meaning of their lives carried on after them. But the meaning humans make is easily broken, so they live in greater fear than before. The stories they have fashioned for themselves take over, and they spend their days trying to be the character they have invented. Their lives belong not to them but to a figure conjured up in their imagination.