Presumably for billions of years we did not exist and then suddenly, poof here we are in this life and then we are to turn to ash and disappear for the rest of eternity. That makes absolutely zero sense. That would mean we are special, that we are born now for a reason. Why are we born then? What gives us our consciousness, how do we develop it? The only logical explanation without invoking some superstitious bullshit is that this is a cycle that repeats itself all the time.
Your consciousness doesn't make you special, you just haven't accepted your situation yet. At least that's my guess anyway, I can't read your mind. I remember when I used to feel like the protagonist in my own story, but this sensation faded eventually.
The fact we are born human is just pure chance. We do not experience it as such because we are born human after all. It's the same as winning a lotto. Somebody who won the lotto would be amazed at how lucky he was. We won the lotto too in the fact that we are born as human however we won the lotto without knowing we played it so we do not even consider how lucky we are.
"We" couldn't be born as anything but ourselves, as if we were, then we wouldn't exist. I suspect you're viewing consciousness as some sort of permanent entity(or maybe not, but I think this deserves explanation), in that it exists and stays fundamentally the same regardless of what it experiences. However this simply isn't how it works.
It's difficult to explain in words to other people, but to be concise, it's not that you've had experiences, but rather that
you are the experiences. Specifically the culmination of your memory(probably not even limited to what you actually remember either, but also events that you don't remember but which affected your behavior), genetic makeup, current thoughts, and current perceptions. If you took all of this away(or even a significant amount of it) you wouldn't simply remain and "be different" somehow, you'd just cease to exist in any real measure.
You will simply be invoked into a new existence without even knowing it. I keep using the word 'you' but once you die 'you' dies with you.
When you die, it ends there. You cease to exist. Or rather, return to your primal state. The primal state of all things. None-existence. Except that in this state you do not perceive anything (obviously, because you do not exist). It's a lot like dreaming without dreams. There is no 'you' anymore in this state. Time does not exist, nothing exists. But still this state does exist and everything is in it. It is the primal building block of the universe one may say. None existence is a lot like what our universe is expanding into. Ever asked yourself that question? If our Universe is expanding than it has to expand into something, right? Something outside of the boundary of the universe. Well that something is a metaphor for the state of no-existance. They are very much alike.
More importantly, you do not last in this state. You are instantly reborn. Because as we discussed before, time does not exist in the state of non-existence therefore if you would be aware of going into such state you would not even perceive it as you would go out of it instantly. Even so, existence of this state is essential even if its outside bounds of time.
Anyhow, after you exit that state you are reborn anew to die and repeat the process. You most likely will be born again as some low-class animal without the ability for self-awareness maybe not even on Earth. Or you might get lucky and be born as a conscious being. Most likely not. It's all just a big game of chance. Maybe you will simply be a collection of cells, just eating away at some rock-food in a cave somewhere. Anyhow you will be reborn. But don't think of it as a continuous chain that you go through. No. Once you die that's it. It will no longer be you. Even if you are reborn. That is not you. That new you has 0 complete 0 relation to your other incarnation. You are not related what so ever. But you will be able to be alive again. You will be grounded in this world once more. Hard to explain this logic properly, I lack the vocabulary.
That's the same thing as infinite nothingness. The new person wouldn't be you anymore than any other creature is "you" right now.
More importantly though, this doesn't really make sense. You seem to be looking at existence as the default state of things, which is understandable, after all it's everything that we can perceive. But to me this way of looking at things seems to be fundamentally wrong. It's not that because you're alive and conscious right now, then that means existence must continue indefinitely. The idea that something can't really exist without persisting forever is correct, but you've got it backwards. It's not that we've always existed, but rather that we've never existed, we don't really exist right now.
The moment you die it will be as if you never existed, that nothing ever existed at all, and that would be correct. All the experiences we've ever had were nothing but transitory illusions created by the brain, our lives are no more real than our dreams, the only difference is that none of us will wake up when the dream ends, and when it inevitably fades into nothingness as all dreams must.
