" Flannery felt another change from within: an increasing awareness of and disgust with the course of life and culture in America in the 1950s. She sensed that people were becoming more and more superficial, obsessed with material things and plagued by boredom, like children. They had become unmoored, soulless, disconnected from the past and from religion, flailing around without any higher sense of purpose. And at the core of these problems was their inability to face their own mortality and the seriousness of it. "

― Robert Greene , The Laws of Human Nature