In recent times, we've have so much comfort made available to us to the point where many can't relate to struggle. When that happens, you're also less likely to assume any risk and more willing to transfer it to the state. We can see it with this pandemic. I'm not going to risk getting this virus (assuming I can), and the government better protect me with as much security and safety it can (or it can't...hence the looming debt crisis we are creating). This isn't austerity, but recklessness. And it doesn't make for a resilient and dynamic society in the long run.
In all this pursuit of comfort, we have fallen into an underlying restlessness. Ross Douthat discusses this from the angle of decadence. And decadence may not always look the way you'd expect. We may think that a decadent society would eventually fall into utter chaos and evil, but it seems it's more likely it would fade into whimper of cultural and economic stagnation.Douthat notes, “A society that generates a lot of bad movies need not be decadent; a society that just makes the same movies over and over again might be. A society run by the cruel and arrogant might not be decadent; a society where even the wise and good can’t legislate might be. A poor or crime-ridden society isn’t necessarily decadent; a society that’s rich and peaceable but exhausted, depressed, and beset by flares of nihilistic violence looks closer to our definition.”
So we may not see the dystopian apocalypse played out in so many films, but something much more boring. Let's even consider this current lock-down playing out: it is painfully dull.
This even explains all the outrage culture and tribal polarization, mostly playing out in the online world (even before the pandemic).
“In an age online frenzy, there is an understandable fear that some kind of cultural-political cascade will carry our society downward into a similar kind of civil strife. But it may be that the nature of our decadence, our civilizational old age, makes that scenario unlikely, and that our problem is a different one: that our battles are sound and fury signifying relatively little; that even as it makes them more ferocious, the virtual realm also makes them more performative and empty; and that online rage is just a safety valve, a steam-venting technology for a society that is misgoverned, stagnant, and yet ultimately far more stable than it looks on Twitter” (Douthat).The real issue with decadence is the inability to see our lives are more than about us. There has to be something more to live for than our own safety or comfort. If that's our primary aim (safety first!), then we lose our ability to truly be creative, resourceful, and resilient. We live in fear of losing the material things that matter least, and never aspire to the immaterial riches that matter most once we lose those material things anyways.