Is Modern Society Addicted to Drama? What a TikTok Joke Reveals About the Brain, Addiction, & Our Hunger for Intensity

A strange question escaped the algorithm and wandered into real life: How often do men think about the Roman Empire?

What began as a TikTok joke quickly turned into something closer to a cultural mirror. Women asked their partners, brothers, and friends the question, expecting confusion or laughter. Instead, many got startlingly confident answers: daily, weekly, often. Sometimes unprompted explanations followed. Battles. Engineering. Discipline. Stoicism. Collapse. Greatness.

From this angle, addiction is not indulgence. It is misfiring self-care.

The internet did what it always does—turned it into a punchline. Men, apparently, were obsessing over marble statues and legionnaires while the rest of the world worried about rent and climate change.

But beneath the humor sat a more interesting problem. Why this symbol? Why did it stick so reliably? Why did it feel familiar rather than absurd?

A statue of a roman soldier in front of a castle - Is Modern Society Addicted to Drama? What a TikTok Joke Reveals About the Brain, Addiction, & Our Hunger for Intensity — The #RomanEmpire trend was not just a joke, it showed a deeper trend, as a window into the collective psyche, that we’ve become addicted to intensity, and without it, everything seems bland and uninteresting. Photo by Caio Fernandes/Unsplash.

Psychologist Scott Lyons saw the #trend not as a historical curiosity but as a neurological one (Source: Fortune). The Roman Empire, in his view, wasn’t the point. It was the container. And the same mental machinery that makes Rome oddly magnetic also fuels addiction, drama, and our modern dependence on stimulation.

To understand the #Tiktok trend—and what it reveals about addiction—we have to talk less about history and more about how the nervous system learns to survive.

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The Roman Empire as a Psychological Object

Most people who say they think about the Roman Empire aren’t thinking about sanitation systems, endemic disease, or a life expectancy hovering around thirty. They aren’t picturing the economic fragility of conquest-based systems or the reality of mass slavery.

They are thinking in images.

The brain does not store the past as a neutral archive. It stores fragments: symbols, emotions, impressions. Over time, those fragments clump together into meaning-bundles. Rome becomes a shorthand for order, strength, endurance, discipline, and permanence. Films, video games, textbooks, myths, and pop culture reinforce the same selective snapshot.

What emerges is not history but fantasy—a clean, legible story in a world that feels increasingly chaotic.

From a neurological perspective, this makes perfect sense. The brain is predictive. It looks for patterns that promise safety and coherence. When the present feels fragmented, it reaches backward toward narratives that appear stable, even if that stability is imaginary.

Rome functions as a myth of order. Not because it was orderly, but because it is remembered that way.

a statue of a Roman man holding a book in front of a building - How a Roman Empire TikTok Trend Exposes the Neuroscience of Addiction and Escapism — From the brain’s perspective, the Roman Empire is an idealized symbol of structure, conquest, and reinforces an identity of greatness; hence why men are likely to think about it often… But why? Photo by Anastasiya Badun/Unsplash.

This is why the trend resonates more during periods of uncertainty. Economic instability, social fragmentation, shifting identities, and a constant background hum of crisis all prime the brain to search for something solid. Rome, stripped of its inconvenient realities, becomes an idea you can lean on.

The fascination isn’t about conquest. It’s about relief.

Drama, Intensity, and the Nervous System

Scott Lyons’s work focuses on a pattern he calls addiction to drama. The word “drama” is misleading. He doesn’t mean theatrical emotion or attention-seeking behavior. He means something more basic: chronic reliance on heightened states to feel alive, safe, or meaningful.

In Lyons’s framework, many people—often without realizing it—become biologically accustomed to operating under pressure. Their nervous systems calibrate around urgency, intensity, and stimulation. Calm doesn’t feel restful. It feels empty, wrong, or vaguely threatening.

Addiction often fills an identity vacuum.

This adaptation often begins early. Environments marked by unpredictability, emotional suppression, or constant demand teach the body a simple lesson: alertness equals safety. Over time, the system forgets how to downshift.

Recovery, in this model, is not about resistance. It’s about retraining.

The result is a subtle dependency. Not necessarily on substances at first, but on activation itself.

Conflict, crisis, overwork, outrage, fantasy—anything that raises internal volume becomes regulating. When stimulation drops, discomfort rises. The system scrambles to correct it.

This is where the Roman Empire trend quietly belongs. Thinking about Rome provides intensity without risk. It activates imagination, identity, and narrative meaning without requiring vulnerability. It’s a safe stimulant for a restless nervous system.

The pattern doesn’t stop there.

From Rome to Addiction and Cigarettes: The Same Loop in Different Forms

Lyons’s core argument is that addiction is not primarily about pleasure. It’s about regulation.

Substances work because they reliably shift internal states. Nicotine sharpens focus and creates artificial calm. Caffeine injects urgency and momentum. Alcohol dampens threat and social vigilance. Stimulants manufacture energy when motivation has collapsed.

These effects are not accidental. They solve specific nervous-system problems.

Men, in particular, are often socialized to compress emotion rather than process it. Sadness becomes numbness. Anxiety becomes restlessness. Fear becomes irritability. Without tools for emotional regulation, the body improvises.

Substances become external regulators.

The Roman Empire functions in the same way, just more subtly. It offers structure, identity, and meaning on demand. So do ideologies, culture wars, endless productivity, and online conflict. These are not distractions. They are coping mechanisms.

two hands holding a cigarette in front of a white background - The Roman Empire Trend, the Addicted Brain, and Why We Struggle With Stillness — Understanding why modern society struggles with stillness, and the role of social media and the news cycle, in molding the reliance on constant intensity and stimulation, opens up our minds on why men mostly, smoke. Even more, that beyond it being a coping mechanism, overcoming addiction is less about removing the cigarette, and more about retraining the nervous system to deal with and familiarize with stillness. Something simple like learning to just do one thing at a time could solve the underlying problem: what we are calling “addiction to drama”. Photo by Meysam Moghimzade/Unsplash.

Lyons emphasizes that when people quit substances without retraining their nervous systems, the addiction usually migrates. Cigarettes disappear. Coffee intake explodes. Alcohol fades. Work becomes compulsive. Drama finds a new outlet.

The mistake is thinking the substance is the #addiction.

It isn’t.

The addiction is the dependency on intensity.

What Addicted to Drama Really Argues

Lyons’s book—Addicted to Drama: Healing Dependency on Crisis and Chaos in Yourself and Others—is not a manifesto against chaos. It’s a manual for understanding how people become dependent on states that once helped them survive.

At its center is a provocative claim: many modern problems are not caused by excess emotion, but by underdeveloped capacity for low-intensity states.

Stillness feels unsafe. Boredom feels like danger. Neutrality feels like emptiness. The nervous system, unable to tolerate these states, reaches for stimulation to restore balance.

This reframes addiction entirely. Instead of asking “Why can’t they stop?” Lyons asks “What state are they trying to regulate?”

From this angle, addiction is not indulgence. It is misfiring self-care.

The body learned one strategy and never learned another.

Addiction as a Survival Strategy, Not a Moral Failure

One of the most useful aspects of Lyons’s framework is that it removes shame from the equation. Shame, neurologically speaking, is gasoline on the fire. It raises arousal, tightens the system, and increases the urge to self-soothe.

Lyons treats addiction as a functional response to an environment that did not teach regulation. This doesn’t excuse harm, but it explains persistence.

If a substance or behavior reliably produces relief, the nervous system will defend it. Willpower alone is no match for biology.

This is why insight often fails. People understand their addiction intellectually while remaining trapped physiologically. The body hasn’t learned an alternative.

Recovery, in this model, is not about resistance. It’s about retraining.

How These Ideas Can Help People Recover

Applied practically, Lyons’s approach shifts the goal of recovery from abstinence to capacity.

The first step is expanding tolerance for low-intensity states. This is unglamorous work. Quiet walks without headphones. Sitting without stimulation. Doing one thing at a time. The objective is not relaxation but non-panic.

The nervous system must learn that nothing bad happens when stimulation drops.

The second step is redirecting activation rather than eliminating it. Addicted systems still need intensity. Physical training, skill acquisition, creative work, and structured challenges provide activation without chemical debt. This keeps the system engaged while lowering harm.

a human body sculpture showing the central nervous system - A Viral Joke, a Nervous System Under Stress, and the Modern Addiction to Intensity — The key to understanding addiction is less about morality but more about regulation. Simply put; The nervous system must learn that nothing bad happens when stimulation drops. Photo by camilo jimenez/Unsplash.

The third step is separating sensation from action. Restlessness does not require a cigarette. Flatness does not require caffeine. Anxiety does not require alcohol. Learning to feel a sensation crest and fall without immediate action retrains the brain’s predictive model.

Another crucial element is identity. Addiction often fills an identity vacuum. Rome works because it offers a story about strength and endurance. Recovery accelerates when people build identities rooted in process rather than outcome—builder, learner, caretaker, craftsman. These identities generate meaning without constant stimulation.

Lyons also normalizes substitution during recovery. Early phases often involve over-correction—excessive exercise, work obsession, caffeine spikes. Rather than treating this as failure, he treats it as scaffolding. Regulation improves first. Intensity can be dialed down later.

Most importantly, Lyons emphasizes safety in the body. Slow breathing, rhythmic movement, consistent sleep, and predictable routines sound boring because they are. They are also neurologically powerful. They teach the body that regulation is internal, not outsourced.

Why Rome Eventually Fades

In this framework, the Roman Empire trend stops being mysterious.

Rome captivates when meaning is scarce.
Drama captivates when stillness feels unsafe.
Substances captivate when regulation is externalized.

As capacity increases, these crutches lose their grip. Not through force, but through irrelevance.

People don’t stop thinking about Rome because they’re corrected. They stop because their nervous systems no longer need symbolic order to feel grounded.

Addiction fades the same way. Not because temptation disappears, but because the body learns new defaults.

The Quiet Conclusion

The #RomanEmpire was never the story. It was a signal.

A signal that many people are starving for structure, meaning, and regulated intensity in a world that provides endless stimulation but very little grounding.

Scott Lyons’s work offers a lens that connects cultural trends, addiction, and modern restlessness into a single pattern. The solution he gestures toward is not heroic transformation, but patient retraining. Teaching the body that calm is survivable. Teaching the mind that meaning does not require crisis.

The strange truth is that recovery looks less like conquest and more like endurance. Less like empire and more like capacity.

a group of Roman statues in a museum - The Roman Empire as a Psychological Object and Why Understanding It Can Help Beat Addiction — Roman statues in a Museum. When you think of the Roman Empire as a psychological object, and understand Scott Lyon’s book, then a picture starts emerging: that addiction is not about indulgence, but more a result of the body’s lack of training on how to live without constant intensity. Photo by Manuela Martinez/Unsplash.

And once the nervous system learns that it can exist without being constantly activated, the marble statues can finally return to history—where they belong.