Rome numbed itself with constant entertainment and indulgence instead of building resilience through struggle, wasting the lessons hardship teaches. The speaker argues modern society does the same, using entertainment to escape problems and losing the sense of purpose that comes from actually confronting them.
Instead of building resilience through challenge, Rome numbed itself with entertainment. They started to treat discomfort as something to escape. Rome wasted its struggles and paid the ultimate price. Now you might be saying, how does this actually apply? Because contrast creates clarity when you see it on a grand scale, like society losing the ability to find the usefulness in problems. Because the opposite side of a problem is purpose, which is something that Rome ignored. They had problems and they would ignore it with entertainment and bread and indulgence and hedonistic ways. So this is a grand scale model, right? Society stopped caring about problems or finding the lessons in problems and actually used entertainment to numb present problems within their civilizations. And many philosophers actually wrote about this in their time.
