Yeah it makes me realize how short life is.

I think the same thing when I look at trees or hills or rocks or even older, human made masrony.

Those things have been there for many human life generations, and will be there for so many more.

Where I live, hiking is very popular, and it's standard to "leave no trace". Many people have been there before you, and many people will be there after. If you think you can leave your mark or that you're an exception, likely, it's only destruction of an otherwise nice thing. So people are encouraged to stay on the trail, not take shortcuts, etc.

I have a saying for myself that I've made recently, and it's that "We are all just visitors here." Sometimes it extends imagination and empathy to everything around us, even the inanimate objects like boulders. That random scraggly rock has seen many many people, most of the people pass by, some may build a relationship with the rock over their lives, but then they die and that relationship is entirely forgotten, the rock still a rock, maybe smaller, maybe more or less covered, maybe moved to a new location, but still there, watching us all pass by in our short stories, like a day's sunlight through a window across a room.