Yeah I do think about the Roman Empire sometimes.
Today I thought about how ancient Roman nobles would eat ridiculously decadent delicacies like nightingale tongues. And like, I thought of that because I was thinking that luxuries of that caliber has never been seen again, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. It made me think of luxuries today that we might not have in the future, either in a dystopian or utopian future, because some of these luxuries are unnecessarily decadent and exploitative. Either there's a collapse where these luxuries can no longer be maintained—like in the collapse of the Roman Empire—or that a future liberated society would simply choose to not make these luxuries because they are too ecologically or socially costly
I also think about the slow degeneration and collapse of the Roman Empire, a collapse that happened slowly over the course of 1000 years, and how in our current society we are already living in collapse. Like the collapse of Rome, it's a slow collapse, but in other ways it's faster like in ecological collapse.