A few lines from "Essay on the Sublimation of Dying" really caught my attention, mainly the Maxim of Synthesis V. "Never believe a text that threatens you with extinction, or that attempts to convince you that you are already dead." At first, it made me think of the film The Truman Show, but after some thought i realized how much of literature hinges on a threat of extinction. Any book (or film) with an alien threat, or a bad guy trying to take over the world, is threatening the reader with extinction. It may seem fine in a fictional setting, where we know that the fiction is just that, fiction. But if literature is our window to the world, should we be looking out the windows where we see death and destruction? It's my bet that these threats of extinction are whats causing a decline in society. People are surrounded by threats of death and destruction, people will act like the end times are nigh. It's no wonder "YOLO" became a popular word.
   Tying into that, the bit from "Total Eclipse" about the crab nebula showed how things don't change much on a cosmic scale. Sure, people come and go, but over the course of 1000 years, the explosion of the crab nebula has barely changed. Something we can change is our literature, and if we don't bring some literature into our society that has a good outlook on the world, society may just pay for it.