No, just because we’re living in the decline of the empire/regime dejour, doesn’t mean we don’t still live our lives when possible.

As an example, If my country, the US, saned up tomorrow and started collecting guns, like actually enforcing it including the inevitable stand offs with the nutters climbing bell towers over it to get it fucking done, I would throw mine in the pile eagerly. Wont happen, but I don’t fetishize the firearm I own explicitly and exclusively to defend myself from the gun nuts.

I have to live next to the neoconfederate nutters with arsenals. I am still subject to the violence of their nuttery. When in (the fall of) Rome.

Human self-importance.

We think we’re magic, despite the fact we aren’t built for high g dogfights at all.

Kind of the same reason us being space colonizers is a pipe dream at this stage in our civilization. We can get a dozen highly trained peak human specimens to grow potatoes on Mars as a symbol, and I’m all for that, but not regular people. One mistake everybody dead, one cabin fever victim in the right position everybody dead. We literally can’t even care for the almost infinitely forgiving habitat we evolved out of that’s perfectly suited to our biology, and all that would require is stop actively, recklessly fucking it up.