The tricky part is that it’s hard to be sure that people will keep caring about the same things for a long time to come. As you said, most of what was written i

The tricky part is that it’s hard to be sure that people will keep caring about the same things for a long time to come. As you said, most of what was written in Anglo-Saxon is gone, even though some of it besides Beowulf probably had “epochal importance” to those who lived at the time. Similarly, many works that were highly esteemed in the Greco-Roman world were eventually lost. Cultures change, religions change, languages change. And they all do so unpredictably. The hardest part isn’t writing something that millions of people find critically important—it’s ensuring that society will continue to find the same things important for centuries. A temporal value-alignment problem.