In a recent Guardian essay, Michèle Mendelssohn and Charlie Tyson discuss a striking contradiction of our modern life. We have unprecedented access to entertainment, luxury, convenience, and digital companionship, yet many people feel emotionally drained rather than fulfilled. With almost anything available at the touch of a screen, they ask why so many of us feel both overstimulated and bored. Their answer is a new form of decadence that has lost its connection to pleasure.
Below are the key takeaway from the essay:
- Decadence was never just about excess. The authors trace the idea to ancient Greece and Rome, where it became linked to decline and moral decay. Today its critics tend to come from the political right, including Ross Douthat, Peter Thiel, and JD Vance, though thinkers on the left have also warned that affluent societies can stagnate. Even so, periods later dismissed as decadent often produced remarkable art, from Rococo painting to the nightlife of Weimar Berlin.
- Pleasure once had a purpose of its own. Writers such as Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, and Joris-Karl Huysmans embraced beauty, excess, and artifice in the late 19th century. According to Mendelssohn and Tyson, they were making a philosophical point. In a culture that prized usefulness above all, they insisted pleasure did not need to justify itself. The essayist Walter Pater once stopped traffic on Oxford’s High Street to stroke a cat, simply for the feel of fur under his fingers.
- The heart of the argument. Modern society kept the appearance of decadence and abandoned what gave it meaning. Luxury, spectacle, and endless consumption remain. Genuine pleasure has been replaced by two obsessions: constant optimisation on one side, numbing algorithmic stimulation on the other. We have more choices than ever, and many of them feel hollow.
- A tale of two isolated lives. The authors set Bryan Johnson beside Duke Jean des Esseintes, the hero of Huysmans’s 1884 novel Against the Grain. Both retreat into tightly controlled private worlds and become consumed by their own bodies. Their goals are opposite. Des Esseintes withdraws to sink further into sensation, surrounding himself with rare books, perfumes, and flowers. Johnson’s Don’t Die regimen treats the senses as suspect. He avoids alcohol and evenings out, eats mainly lentils and boiled broccoli, takes up to 111 pills a day, and spends a reported $2 million a year on the effort.
- Pleasure divides along class lines. Johnson is extreme but not an anomaly, the authors argue. They describe an elite that distrusts pleasure, citing 80-hour work weeks, a $40,000 longevity gym membership, and a private clinic where wealthy women manage what it calls their sexspan. Their own summary is blunt: biohacking and quantified asceticism for the rich, algorithmic stimulation for everyone else. Because elite values shape mainstream culture, they write, that suspicion of pleasure travels downward.
- There is money in dissatisfaction. The authors quote the biotech billionaire Christian Angermayer calling the urge to optimize a divine spark. They note the commercial logic underneath it. A person content with ordinary sensations makes a poor customer. Persuade everyone else to treat mind and body as sites of permanent self-improvement, and the potential market becomes, in Angermayer’s own framing, everybody.
- GLP-1 drugs reveal a cultural shift. One in eight American adults reported using GLP-1 medications for weight loss in a 2025 Gallup poll, and the global market is forecast to reach $190 billion by 2035. The authors acknowledge the real medical benefits and focus on the cultural meaning. Some users report not just reduced appetite but lower libido, emotional flatness, and less interest in the social side of eating. If earlier decadence celebrated abundance, they suggest, today’s version celebrates restraint.
- Beauty becomes something to optimize. The authors turn to looksmaxxing, an online subculture aimed mostly at young men, while recognizing that women have lived under punishing beauty standards far longer. What strikes them is the vocabulary of ranking and domination. A man can be mugged, meaning outshone by a better-looking one, and the point of maxxing is to raise his sexual market value. Where the old decadents treated the face as a mask to play with, looksmaxxers treat it as a set of ratios to be corrected.
- AI reflects the same pattern. Wilde admired artifice, but the authors argue AI delivers a version stripped of feeling. They call it the pleasure-less decadence machine. Its output is eerily hollow, with no body or lived experience behind it, and large language models drain the pleasure from language by steering it toward the predictable. Citing the philosopher Carissa Véliz, they note that a machine has nothing at stake, so it cannot care, and therefore cannot value. Pleasure is one of the ways embodied creatures work out what matters, and that is not a judgment to hand over.
- The original movement had serious flaws. Mendelssohn and Tyson avoid idealizing the historical decadents. They acknowledge the melancholy, the elitism, and the frequent misogyny, and note that W.B. Yeats called them the tragic generation. Some died young. At the same time, the movement opened space for queer expression and later gave Black and postcolonial artists a language for claiming pleasure of their own.
- Recovering pleasure. The authors close with a call for a democratic alternative to optimization culture. So far, they argue, most of the response has been satire about rich people behaving badly, which repeats the problem by equating pleasure with status. They point instead to work that puts the senses first, naming Peter Strickland, Anish Kapoor, Shola von Reinhold’s novel Lote, and John Corigliano’s opera The Lord of Cries.
The essay ends with a revealing contrast. Bryan Johnson counts his pulse to extend his life. Walter Pater counted pulses too, but drew the opposite lesson: the number is fixed, so the work is to get as much into the interval as possible. Mendelssohn and Tyson suggest the better question is not how to lengthen a life but how to notice one, which is why they leave the reader with Pater’s habit of asking what a song or a painting actually does to him. Against a culture devoted to optimization, their instruction is two words: “feel it.”
Acknowledgement: This summary was generated using AI writing tools as part of my experimental learning process. For more information, check out the original article listed below.