Americans have never had easier access to abundance. A smartphone connects you to thousands of movies, restaurants, goods, and experiences. Yet there's a peculiar hollowness to it all. The problem isn't that we're overindulged. It's that we've stripped indulgence of its soul.
Decadence as a concept traces back to Rome's final emperors. Elagabalus served flamingo brains and peppered his food with pearls. Nero had enemies sewn into animal skins and released in gardens to be devoured. These figures became shorthand for civilizational rot, a culture eating itself alive.
But decadence hasn't always been purely destructive. In the late 1800s, writers and artists like Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, and Joris-Karl Huysmans found something liberating in excess. They championed sensation for its own sake, rejecting the era's obsession with usefulness and profit. The decadents argued that pleasure should be useless, enjoyed in passing moments with no justification beyond the experience itself. A cat's fur on your fingertips. A green carnation worn as provocation. Artifice celebrated as superior to nature.
Today we've kept the surface trappings of decadence while gutting its core. We have luxury and excess in abundance. What we've surrendered is the commitment to actual pleasure.
The shift reveals itself most clearly in how the ultra-wealthy now treat their bodies. Bryan Johnson, a tech entrepreneur who funds his quest for immortality, exemplifies the new asceticism. He swallows 111 pills daily, avoids alcohol and sunlight, subsists on lentils and boiled broccoli, and spends roughly $2 million annually on life extension. His regimen is obsessive and extreme, yet stripped of sensory enjoyment. Where an earlier decadent might have reveled in fine wine and rich foods, Johnson treats consumption as a technical problem to optimize.
The comparison to Jean des Esseintes, the protagonist of Huysmans's 1884 novel "Against the Grain," is striking. Des Esseintes also retreated from society into a carefully constructed artificial world. But his retreat was an immersion into subtle sensations: rare books, exotic flowers, sweet perfumes, refined liqueurs. Johnson's withdrawal is an escape from sensation itself, treating pleasure as a hazard to be managed.
This shift extends far beyond individual billionaires. At exclusive medical practices catering to the ultra-wealthy, doctors frame sexual pleasure as a health metric to be optimized through hormonal treatments and tracking devices. Elite gyms advertise longevity memberships costing $40,000 a year. Tech titans champion 80-hour workweeks as virtuous. The wealthiest 0.001% have stopped pretending to enjoy themselves.
Because the ultra-wealthy set cultural norms, their joylessness cascades downward. The most revealing example is the explosive adoption of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy. One in eight American adults now takes these medications for weight loss, with the global market projected to reach $190 billion by 2035. Beyond the medical benefits, something deeper has shifted. Users report emotional flatness, decreased libido, and weakened connection to eating's social dimensions. Appetite itself is being governed and suppressed at scale.
The fin de siècle decadents celebrated cornucopian abundance through art. Aubrey Beardsley drew lush grapes and peacocks overflowing with fruit. Today's version celebrates restraint. Upmarket restaurants offer "small appetite" menus featuring caviar on precisely portioned plates. Eating, once a communal pleasure, has become a domain of self-management and constraint.
The class politics are unmistakable. While algorithms deliver endless stimulation to the masses, the ultra-wealthy pursue quantified self-optimization and biological enhancement. The truly rich have abandoned pleasure entirely, replacing it with biohacking and longevity protocols. Everyone else gets speed and quantity as consolation prizes.
In radically unequal societies, the wealthy set the tone for how pleasure itself is understood. When the ruling class treats desire as something to be suppressed rather than savored, that suspicion of sensation trickles into the culture at large. We inherit a world obsessed with self-improvement, algorithmic stimulation, and the perpetual quantification of every aspect of life. Decadence without pleasure. Excess without joy.
Author James Rodriguez: "We've built a civilization drowning in options but starving for satisfaction, where even billionaires treat eating like a spreadsheet."
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