Welcome to the Era of Decadence Without Pleasure

 So here is an appropriate article from a far-left publication called The Guardian.

We are living in the era of WEALTH unlike anyone has seen in world history and yet people have never been more depressed and anxious.

Of course the Bible warns of this incessantly.  When you have no God and when you have no hope for eternal life that will bring eternal joy and meaning..."the things of this world start to grow strangely dim".

Do you want to have a good time? You know, really enjoy yourself? Click here, 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 English 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.

Here;  Why does everything feel so joyless? Welcome to the age of decadence without pleasure | Society | The Guardian

As the article points out, there have been plenty of other societies of decadence, but it never ends well.

We are the first society that literally has the entire world at the tip of our fingers using our iPhones and clicking on videos from around the world and also are capable of opening Amazon on that phone and ordering any product we want and it will be sent to our address within a day.

The world at the click of a button and yet depression and anxiety meds are handed out like candy.

Certainly this is part of the GREAT FALLING AWAY that the Bible says will encompass the very Last Days.