Self-perpetuation in the strictest sense isn't always the point. The goal isn't to simply impose the same structure onto the future over and over again. It's continuity between structures that's important.

Wanting to live a long life isn't the same as having oneself frozen so that the same physical configuration of the body will persist endlessly. The collapse of ecosystems over a hundred-million-year-long timespan is not a failure, no more than our changing our minds constitutes a failure of self-preservation.