Most of the stories in CivilWarLand in Bad Decline feature characters wrestling with guilt. In several—“CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” “The Wavemaker Falters,” and “The 400-Pound CEO”—the protagonist has, either directly or indirectly, killed another person. The guilt is crushing and all-consuming, and these characters finish their stories coolly resigned to their fates: several are prepared to die, while another accepts a fifty-year prison sentence. Even Mary, who coldly kills cows in “Downtrodden Mary’s Failed Campaign of Terror,” attempts suicide by her story’s final scene, despite being the one character who doesn’t appear to feel culpable for a loss of life.

In “Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz” and “Isabelle,” by contrast, guilt takes a very different role. In a show of compassion that can, at least somewhat, be understood to derive from their own lingering sense of guilt, both protagonists feel obliged to care for another. The guilt in these cases is indirect and secondhand: the narrator of “Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz” is not in any way responsible for the death of his wife, Elizabeth, but he feels deep, protracted guilt about it just the same. His grief and guilt are intertwined, and his obligation to Mrs. Schwartz rests somewhere in the middle—though he isn't responsible for any of her sorrow in life, she came into his as a direct result of his grief. For better or for worse, she is now inextricable from both.

Similarly, the narrator in “Isabelle” translates his guilt over what he’s witnessed into a caretaker’s instinct. Like the protagonist in “Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz,” he's not actually culpable for the events that haunt him. Along with Cole, who spends the duration of “Bounty” setting his own needs aside to rescue his sister, these three protagonists are the ones who harness the power of their discomfort to benefit others. When viewed in contrast to the protagonists of the other four stories, a pattern emerges: those who are consumed by their guilt are resigned to death or imprisonment by the time their stories draw to a close, while those who translate their pain into outward service are the ones who achieve happy endings.

One of the most prominent recurring themes exhibited in CivilWarLand in Bad Decline is the motif of the simulated world. Most of the stories take place in an ersatz recreation of a society that, it’s often implied, used to exist—the settings are a shoddy replacement for the deteriorating world outside their boundaries. The simulations, however ramshackle, historically inaccurate, or otherwise deficient, are understood to be the best the present world can offer under the circumstances.

Some of these settings go beyond just recreation or nostalgia to specifically offer visitors a taste of what they're missing most from the outside—CivilWarLand is a Civil War–themed amusement park offering, with some irony, a bubble of very non-warlike safety and order in an otherwise chaotic, dangerous landscape. Bounty-Land is an immersive medieval experience that offers guests a chance at excess in a time plagued by blight, scant resources, and austerity.

The virtual reality modules in “Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz” offer a version of this at the microscopic level: Mrs. Schwartz struggles with her own memory, so the story’s narrator offers her someone else’s replacement memories in the form of a virtual reality module. Thanks to the immersive technology, she experiences them as though she’s there. When they realize her own memories are a marketable commodity, they’re able to use that same technology to extract Mrs. Schwartz’s memories so that they can perform a similar function for others.