Why does everything feel so joyless?
Picture a palace where rose petals fall from the ceiling at every meal while guests scroll for something new to feel. The surfaces are sumptuous, designer skin, curated diets, endless novelty, but being alive feels thin, pale and oddly distant. This diagnosis has a name: “decadence without pleasure.” For business leaders, it is not merely an aesthetic gripe. It signals shifting demand, attention, and what customers will actually pay for.
Two forces create that feeling. One is an elite politics of optimization, meaning quantified asceticism, longevity projects, intense aesthetic interventions (sometimes called “looksmaxxing”), and bespoke medical practices. The other is algorithmic attention economics, meaning recommendation systems, feeds, and generative AI tuned for engagement and novelty. Together they flood people with stimulation but often leave them short on felt, embodied pleasure.
Quick takeaway for leaders
- Markets are shifting: some medical and lifestyle technologies (notably GLP‑1 drugs) are reordering food, fitness and hospitality demand (could reach $190 billion by 2035).
- Design matters: products that amplify bodily, social and sensory experience, rather than merely optimizing metrics, can build deeper attachment.
- Experiment: measure subjective pleasure, not just clicks; pilot sensory-first experiences and require AI to augment rather than replace physical practice.
The elite playbook: optimization as a moral project
Among high-net-worth circles, optimization reads like a creed. Reporting has described some longevity projects in extreme terms, Bryan Johnson has been portrayed as swallowing “up to 111 pills a day” and spending a reported “$2m a year” on a “Don’t Die” program, and investors and entrepreneurs frame optimisation as virtuous. Christian Angermayer, for example, has been quoted saying, “I think trying to optimise things … is actually the divine spark within us” (as quoted in a New York Times opinion).
That impulse has become an industry. High-end fitness and longevity memberships, concierge clinics and bespoke aesthetic services carry premium price tags, Equinox’s “Optimize” longevity membership has been reported at $40, 000 a year, and some practices explicitly court ultra‑wealthy clients (a clinic and its clientele have been described in reporting under sensational nicknames). The result is a concentrated culture of intensive personal optimisation, expensive, highly measurable, and often private.
Optimization also delivers clear gains, like better diagnostics, longer disability‑free years for many when treatments scale, and tools that broaden access to skill acquisition. The issue is not optimisation itself. The issue is when optimisation becomes the goal, when living well is reduced to being scored, upgraded or marketed as status.
The masses: attention systems, AI and flattened sensation
Most people’s sensory diets are shaped by algorithms. Recommendation systems reward novelty and dwell time. Generative AI systems produce vast amounts of text, images and sound tailored to keep attention. Philosophically, current models lack subjective experience, Carissa Véliz writes in Prophecy that “There is no pleasure or pain for an AI, no skin in the game”, and that matters. Systems without phenomenology do not value pleasure, they value predictability and engagement metrics.
In practice, that creates a risk. Language and art can be flattened into optimized outputs that feel familiar rather than surprising in ways that alter the body or deepen relationships. Large language models often favor safe, common phrasing and highly consumable formats. That raises access and utility, but it also risks homogenizing the emotional tone across mass media.
Pharmaceutical appetite control and social ripple effects
GLP‑1 class drugs (for example, Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro) were developed for diabetes and are now widely used for weight management. Financial research from Morgan Stanley projects the global GLP‑1 market could reach about $190 billion by 2035, driven by oral formulations, coverage expansion and international uptake (Morgan Stanley Research).
Public polling and reporting suggest fast diffusion in some populations. A 2025 Gallup poll reported that one in eight American adults said they had taken GLP‑1 injectables for weight loss (Gallup, 2025). Morgan Stanley’s market work also links higher adoption in some zip codes to reduced quick‑service spending and possible growth in experiential dining and fitness, early indicators that appetite‑altering medicines can reshape consumption patterns.
Clinically, GLP‑1 trials and FDA prescribing information document frequent gastrointestinal effects, like nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and constipation. Reports of lethargy, decreased libido and emotional flattening appear in journalism and patient accounts. These signals are emergent and need careful clinical follow-up rather than being treated as settled causal facts. The right interpretation is cautious: appetite and the social rituals around eating are changing for some people, and markets and experiences are adapting in response.
Fin‑de‑siècle lessons: experience as an end
Late‑19th‑century decadents, Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Walter Pater and others, did not simply worship surface luxury. They elevated “experience itself” as an end. Walter Pater’s formulation is exact and instructive:
“Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.”, Walter Pater
Pater’s diagnostic questions remain useful as a design heuristic:
“What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me? What effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? and if so, what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by its presence, and under its influence?”
Historic decadents aimed for sensuous, embodied intensities. Contemporary culture keeps the artifice but often loses the end goal. Optimization performs value without always delivering felt value.
Where art and design push back
There are contemporary countercurrents reclaiming bodily sensation. Films by Peter Strickland, Anish Kapoor’s visceral sculptures, novels like Shola von Reinhold’s Lote and operas such as John Corigliano’s The Lord of Cries foreground sensory experience in ways that resist platform logic. These works are not mass products, but they offer models: artifice directed toward bodily response rather than toward metrics.
What this means for business leaders and designers
If “pleasureless decadence” describes a real shift, it brings concrete opportunities and risks.
- Prioritize embodied KPIs. Add a short “Embodiment” or “Pleasure” self‑report to customer surveys (for example, a one‑ to five‑point scale on how physically or emotionally enlivened a service made someone feel) and track it alongside engagement metrics.
- Design experiments that amplify ritual and sociality. Pilot low‑cost sensory experiments, such as ritualized dinners, shared classes, or a “no‑phones” seating section, and measure repeat visits, net promoter score and embodied self‑reports over six weeks.
- Require AI to augment, not replace, tactile practice. Treat AI tools as assistants: scheduling optimization, personalized learning paths for a craft class, or curation that sends customers to a physical event. A/B test AI‑led versus human‑led sensory experiences and keep the winner.
- Watch distributional effects. Expensive optimization services concentrate cultural power. Track access metrics and consider sliding pricing, community slots or partnerships to broaden reach and reduce the optics of decadence as the exclusive preserve of the wealthy.
- Build “AI guardrails.” For any product where AI substitutes for human sensory labor (for example, virtual taste, scent simulation, fully automated hospitality), require an evidence standard: show that AI output preserves or increases self‑reported pleasure before broad deployment.
Questions to ask, and what leaders should do now
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Is AI really incapable of producing pleasure?
AI systems have no subjective experience; they do not feel. Their outputs can still occasion pleasure in humans. Action: run A/B tests where AI augments a live sensory experience (curation, scheduling, personalized prompts) and measure both engagement and self‑reported pleasure.
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Are GLP‑1 drugs making people anhedonic?
Some users report emotional flattening, lethargy or decreased libido, but large‑scale causal links remain under study; established trial data mainly document gastrointestinal side effects. Action: monitor customer wellbeing with brief surveys, consult medical advisors before changing product strategy, and treat clinical reports as evolving evidence.
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Can a democratic “New Decadence” scale?
It’s aspirational. Scaling sensory richness requires affordable access to arts and leisure, labor models that preserve time for ritual, and market incentives for experiences over extractive personalization. Action: pilot community‑priced experiences and measure retention and social reach.
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Should companies invest in optimization tools or “real” experiences?
Both markets will persist. Durable attachment favors experiences that change bodies and relationships. Action: combine technology-driven convenience with sensory depth, use AI to lower friction, not to replace touch and presence.
Pulses and priorities
Pater ended by measuring life in felt beats: “A counted number of pulses only, ” and urged widening that interval, “in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time.” The contemporary task for leaders, creators and technologists is practical, choose whether the sheen of modern decadence will be mere surface or whether it will be reinvested in sensation that actually alters bodies and bonds.
If you want customers to stay, don’t just polish the surface, make something that makes them feel more alive. The pleasure is often right under the sheen, waiting for someone to design toward it.