The background process of life and death, barring any sort of extraneous crisis, is seemingly tragic enough as it is, without terminal stage societies to think about. In the background process, no matter what one does, one is going to peak, and decline, and die, and the only thing that can be done is to perpetually maximize this interval for each individual.
One holds onto others, and then one goes. On and on along a perpetual string of failures, which can only be held off until a later time.
But this tragic condition is itself a spiritual condition brought about by the current collective experience in society as it is constituted. When you feel - or are made to feel - that you are separate from the surrounding earth and that you and your loved ones are just "hanging on" in a cold vacuum, this is the experience you tend to get.
Further, contained in the modern and colloquial conception of tragedy is a tendency that eventually gives rise to an increasingly intense grasping, and an equally intense eventual release.
Even in Western history, there were conceptions of "tragedy" which saw it as both a terrible cataclysm and end, but also a merciful release that dashes apart bad karmic patterns which gave rise to the release, and which were finally put to rest, the experience of which can bring about all kinds of healing and growth in the participants.
There then is the spiritual possibility - and we see this in many places - that one and one's loved ones are the same as the rest of the earth, and that the end is merely transformation.
But our common conception of "tragic" is something unthinkable which should be struggled against at all costs - a bad word. And when you struggle against something inevitable at all costs, you greatly compress the region of the "good," while simultaneously compressing the "bad," and then it all bursts forth eventually anyway with tremendous force.
