Sex and the city and the mob and the mall

"One of the causes of the downfall of Rome was that people, being fed by the state...ceased to have any responsibility for themselves or their children, and consequently became a nation of wasters. They frequented circuses, where paid performers appeared before them in the arena, much as we see the crowds now flocking to look on at paid players playing football...Thousands of boys and young men, pale, narrow-chested, hunched-up, miserable specimens, smoking endless cigarettes, numbers of them betting, all of them learning to be hysterical as they groan and cheer in panic unison with their neighbors--the worst sound of all being the hysterical scream of laughter that greets any little trip or fall of a player."
(R. Baden-Powell from Scouting for Boys, as quoted in Among the Thugs by Bill Buford)

The self-engrossed life of pure, stimulation-craving consumption seems to be the booby-trap along western culture's several hundred year path from radical social hierarchy to radical social individualism.

We commitment-phobic 20-somethings wander from place to place, looking for the next psychological fix. It may be a stage-show of immense pathos, an adrenaline-fueled splurge on a luxury that dangles just outside our means, an erotically-tinged connection with a world of fantasy and/or celebrity, some shade of numbed physical intoxication, or (as explored in Among the Thugs) a hypnotizing orgy of violence. In all cases, as in the Coliseum, sensational, engrossing, exciting, high-gloss, heart-racing entertainment is the prize and the cold, gray, mundane dungeon of boredom and obligation is the most frightening possibility for existence.