The Joyless Age: Decadence Without Pleasure in Modern Society

London, United Kingdom Jul 26, 2026 ALN: Do you want to have a good time? You know, really enjoy yourself? , and tell us your desires. Maybe it’s a new outfit, or some exotic cuisine delivered anonymously and steaming hot to your door. Maybe it’s porn or gambling. Perhaps you prefer the infinite scroll, the endlessly unfurling ribbon of glossy images and videos starring people you’ll never meet doing things you’ll never do. Or maybe you favor talking to a chatbot who will assure you that you are the most special of all its users.

For anyone with an Internet connection and a little discretionary income, the contemporary moment offers a superabundance of seductive distractions. Why then the pervasive mood of emptiness? Why are so many at once overstimulated and bored? Welcome to the era of decadence without pleasure.

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.

So decadence has an inescapably pejorative ring, suggesting decay, excess and a falling away from norms and ideals. Critics of decadence have usually hailed from the political right, and the same is true today: consider conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s critique of cultural and economic stagnation in his 2020 book The Decadent Society, or billionaire investor Peter Thiel’s complaints about faltering innovation and the supposed decline of the west. JD Vance likes to invoke the fall of Rome, warning, in his 2026 memoir Communion, that the US is “a great civilization” tumbling into “disrepair”. But plenty of thinkers on the left also worry that modern wealthy societies have entered a period of paralysis, under the shadow of what the Italian theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi calls “the slow cancellation of the future”.

That all sounds bad. Yet a passionate minority has sometimes found, in decadence, reasons for hope. Cultures later judged decadent produced extraordinary upwellings of art, like the flare of a dying star. Think of the undulating arabesques of Rococo painting before the French Revolution, or the lush shimmering silks of the late Ottomans, or the experimental cinema and nightlife of Weimar Berlin.

Nowhere was the cultural potential of decadence more visible than in the late-19th century. In France, Britain and (with less gusto) in the United States, artists such as Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Joris-Karl Huysmans and Rachilde developed new literary and visual styles championing extravagance, sensuousness and the superiority of artifice. It is to these avant-garde experiments that we owe green carnations (the fakest of flowers), frivolous dandies obsessed with perfumes, a bejeweled tortoise crushed to death by the weight of its splendor, and erotic nightmares including a woman with monstrous flowers growing between her thighs and a male anatomical model whose legs spread at the click of a spring so that he can be penetrated by his female lover. Such taboo-busting grotesquery protested against the inertia of modern civilization by applying moral and aesthetic shock treatment.

The decadents, however, were not just provocateurs. Their revolt against Victorian society’s deadening enslavement to usefulness, materialism and conventionality put forward a positive philosophy of life, a certain way of thinking about pleasure. Against their era’s obsession with use-value and profit, the decadents insisted that pleasure was, or ought to be, “useless”, enjoyed for its own sake in life’s passing moments. “Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end,” intoned the essayist Walter Pater, one of the guiding lights of decadence, in his masterpiece The Renaissance. A reclusive Oxford don, Pater was said to have once stopped High Street traffic to stroke a cat. Why? For the sensation of fur beneath his fingers. The virtue of decadent pleasure is that it is useless, an end in itself.

The fixations of fin-de-siècle decadence that inspired Oscar Wilde and company are still with us, but in shrivelled, technologically mediated forms. GLP-1s turn the delights of eating into a problem to be managed. Anti-ageing remedies and “looksmaxxing” turn decadence’s preoccupation with self-styling into a (literally painful) form of self-optimisation. AI restages decadence’s love of artifice by outsourcing human thinking to a chatty, eager-to-please machine butler.

The problem with contemporary culture isn’t that we’re too decadent. We have inherited the surfaces of decadence – luxury, excess, artifice, bodily display – but have surrendered the fin de siècle’s commitment to pleasure. The result is a culture in which pleasure is subordinated to programs of optimisation and replaced at scale by numbing algorithmic stimulation and promises of instant gratification. Whether you’re after goods, food, art or ideas, you can get more, faster, now.

But quantity and speed can’t make up for the paradox at the heart of today’s decadence: the fact that it’s often “meh” and oddly joyless. It’s a sign of the times that this spring, Amazon’s Chinese rival launched in the UK and Europe under a name that promises to deliver emotional fulfilment: Joybuy.

The ‘looksmaxxing’ era

Bryan Johnson, the frequently shirtless tech tycoon who has funnelled his fortune into what he calls the “Don’t Die” movement, has turned his quest for immortality into a prolonged exhibition of ascetic self-management. His lifestyle is harrowingly spartan: he doesn’t drink alcohol, avoids the sun, never goes out in the evening, and subsists primarily on lentils, boiled broccoli and macadamia nuts. Yet his regimen is, in its peculiar way, one of prurient excess. He swallows up to 111 pills a day, tracks his night-time erections, and once tapped his teenage son for blood plasma. His fight against death costs a reported $2m a year.

Johnson presents himself as a man of the future, but he has a 19th-century double. While pallid, faintly androgynous men with money and strange habits are not rare in decadent literature, the most famous is Duke Jean des Esseintes, the hero of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s 1884 novel Against the Grain, a work considered the Bible of decadence. The last scion of an aristocratic French family, des Esseintes creates for himself a cloistered world of voluptuous artifice: padded walls, rare books, exotic flowers, fragrant bonbons, subtle liqueurs, perfumes so sweet they verge on rancid.

Like Johnson, des Esseintes is medically fragile, obsessed with death, and preoccupied with the minutiae of his private sensations. Like Johnson, he sees his retreat from ordinary society into a tightly controlled artificial environment as an experiment that tests the limits of human possibility. But whereas des Esseintes’s withdrawal is an immersion into the subtleties of sensation, Johnson’s “Don’t Die” movement treats the delights of the senses as suspect, even fatal. Des Esseintes hosts a funeral banquet for his “dead virility” in a dining room draped in black, opening on to charcoaled gardens, with guests dining on black-bordered plates filled with black food (rye bread, caviar, black pudding, cuts of meat dripping with liquorice-coloured sauce). Johnson, by contrast, treats impotence as a technical problem, repeatedly shocking his penis to increase his erections.

Johnson’s programme is extreme, but he is not an anomaly. His lifestyle makes visible, in exaggerated form, new attitudes toward pleasure and embodiment being pushed by today’s tech billionaires. While some superwealthy people in or around Palo Alto are biohacking for longevity with the help of concierge medics, others are treating even sexual pleasure as a domain to be perfected through medical interventions. For example, at Dr Sally Greenwald’s exclusive OB-GYN practice, nicknamed the “Billionaire’s Vagina Club” – Greenwald describes her clientele as “the top 0.001%” – middle-aged women can improve their “sexspan” through bespoke advice, hormonal cocktails and tracking devices. “Sex equals sleep, stress reduction, cardiovascular engagement, relational fulfilment, and pelvic-floor health, and each of those equals health,” Greenwald says.

These attitudes reflect the fantasies of a narrow elite obsessed with human enhancement and – above all else – the prolongation of their own survival. The class politics of pleasureless decadence can be roughly summarized as: biohacking and quantified asceticism for the rich, algorithmic stimulation for the rest.

In contexts of extreme inequality, rich people tend to set the terms by which pleasure is understood and experienced. The very fact of inequality injures pleasure, because in a stratified society, food, art, travel and other delights can devolve into occasions to demonstrate rank or taste. Our present social order, however, is not just radically unequal; it’s dominated by a ruling class that distrusts pleasure and sensation. What passes for “fun” among today’s top 0.001% amounts to anything but: think of the 80-hour workweeks championed by tech titans like Elon Musk, or Equinox gym’s “Optimize” longevity membership costing $40,000 a year, or courtside seats at Knicks games inside the miniature surveillance state that is Madison Square Garden. And because of their outsized political and cultural influence, their sway over public and private investment, and their habit of not paying their share of tax, the pleasurelessness of the ultra-monied classes trickles down to the rest of us.

“I think trying to optimise things … is actually the divine spark within us,” recently professed the German biotech billionaire Christian Angermayer, a champion of “humanmaxxing”, the use of drugs and supplements to enhance the body. Divinity aside, it seems pertinent to mention that the person content with every day sensations makes for a poor consumer. But get people outside the plutocratic class to reconceive their minds and bodies as sites of perpetual self-improvement, and you have, in Angermayer’s words, “a total addressable market of ideally 100%”.

The most culturally revealing such market is for GLP-1s such as Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro. One in eight American adults report taking GLP-1 injectables for weight loss, according to a 2025 Gallup poll, and far more express interest in taking them. The global market for this class of drugs is expected to reach $190bn by 2035. For many, these medications confer real benefits. Yet it seems fair to ask: what does the widespread embrace of appetite-governing pharmaceuticals suggest about our culture’s handling of pleasure and desire?

GLP-1s reshape the felt relation between desire and satisfaction, as research has already begun to show. While more studies are needed, some users report a diminution of pleasure across several areas of their lives: they complain of lethargy, decreased libido, emotional flatness and a weakened connection to the social dimensions of eating.

The decadence of the fin de siècle celebrated cornucopian abundance. Take for example Aubrey Beardsley’s 1896 drawing The Fruit Bearers, depicting two figures bearing colossal bowls of fruit, lush grapes overhanging, a peacock in the background observing the opulent procession. In contrast, today’s anhedonic decadence celebrates the inhibition, even the transcendence, of appetite. While in haute cuisine the trappings of indulgence are preserved – some upmarket eateries now offer “small appetite” menus featuring caviar and foie gras – the tendency is toward delicate minimalism. Because eating is a quintessentially communal activity, an intervention in how people eat is also an intervention in how we socialize.

It seems reasonable to expect, meanwhile, that the widespread uptake of such drugs may contribute to a tightening not just of belts but of beauty norms. Looksmaxxing, an online subculture aimed primarily at young men, presents a darker strain of physical perfectionism, treating the body as a site of correction. Of course, women have long been ground down by painful and impossible beauty standards. What’s striking about looksmaxxing is the migration of this kind of disciplinary logic into a male subculture that speaks of beauty in terms of brutal domination: anyone can be “mogged” (outshone by a more handsome man), and one of the purposes of maxxing is to increase one’s “sexual market value”. Key to this subculture is the rejection of subjective taste in favor of mathematical norms (looksmaxxers prize certain ratios of facial proportion, measuring, for instance, the height of the forehead or the distance between the pupils).

“[T]o make oneself beautiful is a universal instinct,” a young Max Beerbohm wrote in his 1894 essay A Defence of Cosmetics, a send-up of decadence’s cult of artifice. Whereas the fin-de-siècle decadents with their love of makeup treated the face as a mask to play with or an enigma to contemplate, looksmaxxers recast the face as a set of homogenizing metrics requiring arduous correction. “The men are weeping in the gym,” writes Andrew McMillan in his prescient 2015 poem about punitive male beauty standards:

they have got too close to the glass

and now they are laying

in the broken pools of their own faces.

The pleasureless decadence machine

The fin de siècle had its own cult of masculine self-display in the form of the dandy, with his carefully tailored clothes and ostentatious mannerisms. Today, however, the dandy has morphed into a new archetype: the self-optimizing individual, who measures their worth by productivity and efficiency. This shift reflects a broader cultural trend where pleasure is often sidelined in favor of relentless self-improvement.

In this pleasureless decadence machine, the joy of living is replaced by a focus on metrics and outcomes. The modern individual is bombarded with messages that equate success with constant achievement, leaving little room for the simple enjoyment of life’s pleasures. The irony is that in our pursuit of optimization, we may be sacrificing the very experiences that make life worth living.

As we navigate this landscape, it becomes crucial to reclaim the notion of pleasure as an essential part of our humanity. We must recognize that joy and fulfillment cannot be quantified or optimized; they must be experienced in their raw, unfiltered forms. Only then can we hope to break free from the cycle of joylessness that defines our contemporary existence.

In conclusion, the age of decadence without pleasure presents a paradox that challenges our understanding of happiness and fulfillment. As we grapple with the complexities of modern life, it is imperative to find ways to reconnect with the simple joys that enrich our lives and foster genuine connections with ourselves and others.