Worst disaster in 2000 years

The Tsunami that hit Sri Lanka on the 26th was the worst disaster recorded in the Sri Lanka's more than 2000 year old history. This is the first clearly recorded sea flooding after the flooding of Sri Lanka in the 1st century BC during the reign of king Kelani Thissa. That also could have been a Tsunami. Another similar but smaller in scale disaster was recorded during the Portuguese rule about 500 years ago. When we read the history books, we tend to think that those events recorded would have been misinterpreted or exaggerated. That's because we simply cannot imagine that the sea could rise up to 5 or 10 meters. But it happened. As of today the death toll is around 30,000 in Sri Lanka and several tens of thousands still missing. This would be around the number of people killed during the past 20 years of war in this country. People of this country have been killing each other for land or home land or whatever. But disasters like this show us that how insignificant we are in this world. It took only several minutes to wipe out entire towns and villages. The people there may have been fighting for their land for decades. But what was the outcome. Only death. All their houses and wealth got washed away. That is nature. It does not discriminate among race or religion, good or bad, rich or poor. This makes me wonder why we struggle to accumulate wealth, land, etc. since we are going to die anyway. Entire families got killed. So why did they bother to do what ever they did. We are going to live in this world for a very limited number of years. So why do we bother to build concepts like my race, my homeland, my religion, my house, etc. when we don't even own our own lives. Tsunami took at least 30,000 lives. Those live were thought to belong to 30,000 people. But they really didn't have any control over their own lives. So did those lives really belong to them? Did they own them or did they simply used them for a limited period? Do we own our own lives? Why do we bother to label country, race, religion, land as mine or ours, when we don't even own a life of our own?