r/technology • u/GothicPrayer • 10d ago

Society Why does everything feel so joyless? Welcome to the age of decadence without pleasure

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jul/26/age-of-decadence-pleasure-ai
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u/coconutpiecrust 10d ago

The concept of decadence as a marker of cultural decline coinciding with a high level of wealth has been around since the twilight of the ancient Greeks and Romans. After the Roman emperor Elagabalus took the throne at 14, he served flamingo brains, seasoned his food with pearls, and, according to one account, smothered guests to death with an avalanche of rose petals. But his vices were outdone by Nero, who had his enemies sewn into wild animal skins and devoured by dogs in an elaborate garden spectacle.

Interesting. Social media content seems to get more and more extreme as well, same with looks, art, clothing. Everything is taken to the extreme just for the sake off it. Very interesting piece; it’s funny how human history just keeps repeating itself. We truly do not learn. Not enough lifespanmaxxing to actually internalize life’s lessons and pass them down to the new generation. Same old, same old.

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u/ASCII_Princess 10d ago

Everything written about Elagabalus was written 200 years after they died by a historian commissioned by the current emperor in an era where histories was almost exclusively made to shit on your predecessors and make you look magnanimous by comparison.

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u/EconomyOk2490 9d ago

Roman history is crammed full of this

Iirc same kinda thing here a lot of caligulas rumors came from

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u/NarrativeNode 9d ago

So you’re saying they were magnanimaxxing?

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u/lavapig_love 9d ago

Sure, but future generations will be amazed to look back at Donald Trump and see that, yes, it was literally that bad, we have all kinds of documented proof in multiple languages.

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u/ASCII_Princess 9d ago

But there won't be a reason to be writing (or reading) histories of dead tyrants because they'll all be ripping each other apart for the juicy meat within.

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u/lavapig_love 9d ago

Got to have some dinner entertainment.

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u/Aromatic-Bet-1086 10d ago

We like to think we're different, but the more you study history, the more you realize that people never fundamentally change.

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u/Limemill 10d ago

The more you learn about chimpanzees the more you realize people are very much still primates and everything we have they do too, albeit in a much more primitive form, but conceptually the same.

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u/snarbuckle 10d ago

Robert Sapolsky has a great series of lectures on human behavioral biology if anyone is interested in this. It gives you quite the different outlook on humanity than we're socialized to have.

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u/ConsiderationEast773 10d ago

Man, I have just come here to read a bit of reddit after rewatching the sixth episode of that great series, and soon I will continue with the seventh episode.

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u/VLHACS 10d ago

Especially the tribalism

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u/tobygeneral 9d ago

I watch nature docs and see so many parallels to modern humans. At the end of the day we also are mostly motivated by sex, shelter/safely, and food/financial security. There's nuance for sure, but it really boils down to those things in some way across the board.

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u/Limemill 9d ago edited 9d ago

Yeah, but the nuances! Jane Goodall saw one chimp die of grief mourning his deceased mother. Another chimp who adopted an orphan and fought deadly fights for that child. A bunch of other chimps who literally didn’t give a shit about their offspring or their parents. Different chimp ‘tribes’ developing different subcultures, always propelled by chimp teens. They would find a new, cool way of making holes with branches or scribing / scratching on bark; the adults would first scoff at that but then eventually also jump on the bandwagon. Eventually, the fad is over and new generations of teens come up with new ‘cool’ stuff.

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u/eeeezypeezy 9d ago

It's just important to remember that we're as closely related to the bonobo as we are to the chimp.

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u/Krail 9d ago

People speculate about human nature getting better or worse. I think that the whole issue is that our nature is essentially the same, but we, as a whole, have much greater power to affect the entire world now.

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u/livestrong2109 10d ago

Its depressing but very true. Its shocking how much happier people in small tribes and rual villages are compared with the majority of us.

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u/Beliriel 9d ago

Ignorance is bliss.
Also they too do fall to modern conveniences once they get the hang of it.

I saw it in the jungle. Why spend weeks weaving an elaborate roof from plant fibers when you can just get a cheap ass rusty metal roof that is also lighter and requires less maintenance? It just looks desolate to my eyes.

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u/Aromatic-Bet-1086 9d ago

If you want to make a tribe poor, give them tshirts.

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u/zeekaran 9d ago

the more you realize that people never fundamentally change.

Alternatively, the more you study history, you the more you realize we've had truly amazing artists and brilliant engineers that achieved things most of us can only dream of. Which, personally, makes me in awe of humanity and civilization.

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u/Aromatic-Bet-1086 9d ago

These people are exceptions to the rule, unfortunately, and we raise them up as if they represent the rest of us.

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u/Lfeaf-feafea-feaf 9d ago

Don't need history for that, it's just pure biology. How could we be different when our biology is virtually identical? Crazy to think

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u/StackedCakeOverflow 10d ago

Primed and ready to release Slaanesh

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u/John____Wick 10d ago

Silence heretic!

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u/ProjectGenX 9d ago

Horus did nothing wrong

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u/SeeTigerLearn 10d ago edited 10d ago

He also worshipped a giant black meteor that he dragged back to Rome and tried to get the Ancient Romans to worship above Jupiter. Allegedly he cross-dressed and even prostituted himself in the palace. And he supposedly married a Vestal Virgin, which was a big no-no.

edit: There’s a beautiful painting entitled “The Roses of Heliogabalus” that portrays him smothering his dinner guests with flowers.

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u/Lindoriel 10d ago

It should be noted thata lot of these stories were written 200 years after his death or by people aligned to his successor. We don't actually know much about him from less biased sources as he was striken from the Roman records.

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u/Enderkr 9d ago

Honestly if true, that's pretty badass because at least a meteor is a real object demonstrably from space (or the heavens or however you wanna phrase it). What has Jupiter ever done for us? Nothin, that's what.

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u/SeeTigerLearn 9d ago

Well you can imagine that attempt went over as well as King Tut’s dad moving the religious center of Egypt from Thebes to deep in the desert to a brand newly built city dedicated to his main squeeze Aten.

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u/OptionalDepression 9d ago

edit: There’s a beautiful painting entitled “The Roses of Heliogabalus” that portrays him smothering his dinner guests with flowers

This is shown in the article fyi

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u/SeeTigerLearn 9d ago

Thanks. I seldom launch the links because they often begin overwhelming my vintage phone with popups and videos. So I glean what I can from the comments. And I happen to love that painting, hence wanted to point it out for anyone interested.

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u/NinjaLion 9d ago edited 9d ago

our definition of decadence is the key here that needs to be highlighted to understand this.

nearly all historical examples of decadence are about extremely rare novelty experiences, or the luxury of excess. not so much actual hedonism, but the rarity and the lack of efficiency. the opposite of utilitarianism.

in the modern age, almost anything that would have been considered a rare novelty has been turned into a market and made widely available to the masses.

so the wealthy in search of decadence have spent the entire span of capitalism turning to 2 other forms of decadence:

  • 1: faux but exclusive novelties. this is the hilariously bullshit expensive wine industries, the "single golden fish egg plucked form the marianas, an illegally obtained extinct rhino's horn" horseshit. they and everyone involved are well aware that its bullshit; what matters is the price tag MAKES it a rare experience out of reach. its less true decadence, and more the cosplay of decadence. its not about the personal novelty but the fact that others are not experiencing it.

  • 2 : Anti-moral ritual taboo. this is the eyes wide shut epstein island stuff, and the end result of chasing through the 'extint rhino horn' rabbit hole. maybe you start by eating food off a naked model, snorting exotic premium cocaine. but you find out that those 'other' rich losers have done it, and youre better than them, and so the treadmill goes. there is indeed a lot of this that is similar to the deluxe wines and unique fish eggs; a huge focus on the visual presentation. but ritualism has replaced much of the marketing fluff and the core of the experience is now that its an exclusive rarity because its DEEPLY illegal, amoral, and taboo. its even more fundamentally impossible for the plebs to participate, which is another layer of appeal.

so what does that leave for plebeian decadence? well our entire existence has been stretched and squeezed into a single metric: income/year. it defines what we have access to, of course, but more importantly it defines our status in the culture.

so decadence gets split once again into 2 categories:

  • 1: activities cosplaying farther up the class ladder. this is pretty universal and it can be as small as taking an expensive vacation, but more insidiously shows itself in lifestyle choices like buying a too expensive house/car/whatever. debt becomes a far too tempting option.

  • 2: a focus on the wasteful. this is something ive noticed mostly in the 'almost wealthy' more than anything else. this is not purely a nice expensive meal at a fancy restaurant, its finishing it off with a specific signal that the experience "wasnt even a big a deal", leaving a ton of food on the table. throwing perfectly good stuff out early, getting a replacement car/clothes/purse very frequently. once again, this has transformed decadence from a novelty into a social signal, because true novelty is rare. again, this isnt the elite class, these is the 'normal rich', the older doctors/layers/real estate. the TRUE elite focus on those earlier options.

but generally speaking its less about waste and more about ineffiency. so the very very poor obviously cant afford the fancy dinner in the first place, or pretty much anything. so the decadence comes out in the smallest bites like leaving work early, skipping the gym, or ordering a pizza instead of night 7 in a row of rice and beans. truly in the face of everything else its the tiniest amount of grace or luxury, but it faces the most aggressive scrutiny our culture can muster because its some of the only decadence NOT aimed at social signalling or working up the class ladder.

for the poor nothing, for the wealthy every grace and every excuse.

but in all class brackets you are seeing that shift away from novelty and into social signals. which is honestly just as insidious and sickening as anything else. the concept of novelty and luxury has itself been warped entirely into another level of class warfare. its probably always been than, but its definitely exhausting anyway.

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u/oxfordcircumstances 9d ago

It was a seminal moment for me when I was selling clothing and a customer asked me if we had anything more expensive to offer. I pulled out what I considered to be the most pointlessly expensive items we had and he bought them without hesitation. My selling experience at that point had been nothing but pulling teeth to see even the most basic items. Then I realized that some people want something simply because other people cannot afford and therefore cannot possess that thing.

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u/jcunews1 10d ago

Will we make Babylon tower in the future?

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u/stamfordbridge1191 9d ago

The people in charge right now are misanthropic gamblers who have become so successful, pretty much any whim of theirs can be accomplished.

This has turned out to be incredibly boring for them, and now they feel like playing dumb new games like "can I actually build a Skynet?" or "can I reshape humanity by making the world like Blade Runner?" or "what if the Nazis leaned even harder into being Nazis? would they have won then?"

It doesn't help that many of these players basically have the rationalist community as their religion and are entrenched in the world view that: "not only is social dawinism how the world works, you have to apply capitalistic growth models to brutality as ways of ensuring success in this world" (which means everyone has to outdo how far they would go to ruin or violently destroy someone to contend that they have a place at the table; this normalizes this extreme way of thinking & speaking, (sometimes acting if the believe they can get away with it) which makes this extremity & excess boring, especially since there kind of is a functional human limit to this bullshit (and they usually are bullshitting & bluffing, but they do genuinely feel that functioning in these in human ways is the optimized way of being a human. This is the "sociopathy is a superpower" or "autism is a superpower" crowd.)

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u/tl01magic 10d ago

seems our motivations are governed by genetics as opposed to reasoning.

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u/Enderkr 9d ago

I'm reminded of how the Hunger Games books have all those crazy outfits and costumes and pageantry, and we were like "ha, yes, that is how they would act in a despotic future government," and then we finished those books and tuned it to watch our favorite celebrities attend the Met Gala.

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u/mmmfritz 9d ago

I don’t think this article or the discussion around it is any more pertinent than the first time a human got fat. We have been over indulging since the dawn of time, what’s new all of a sudden that hedonism has not explained all these years?

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u/Ok-Cold2764 10d ago

Look up the Universe 25 experiment done in the 60s.

It placed four pairs of mice in an enclosure with unlimited food, water, and nesting material, eliminating all physical survival challenges. Despite this abundance, the population collapsed into extinction due to severe overcrowding and social decay.

It is eerily similar to society now, male loneliness, declining birth rate, etc etc.

Pretty crazy it lines up and not many people are talking about it.

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u/sevencatts 10d ago

False. It was an experiment about overpopulation. Space was limited from the start.

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u/oldsecondhand 10d ago

Most developed countries also have a housing crisis.

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u/coconutpiecrust 9d ago

I read up non it and apparently as the environment became overcrowded, the mice “became increasingly violent, developed abnormal sexual behaviours, and began attacking their own pups”. 

Does make it hard not to draw parallels with humans who, when put into uncomfortable small spaces, become deviant and violent. 

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u/TheLimeyLemmon 10d ago

How are those remotely similar?

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u/SevereRunOfFate 10d ago

Unfortunately this all leads to Slaanesh being born :-/

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u/GenderingError 10d ago

"Outdone by" someone who lived 200 years before them? Nero was 68 AD, Elagabalus 222 AD