How the disappearance of the old Christmas mall, the rise of digital consumerism, and the commercialisation of almost every aspect of human life reveal a deeper crisis of meaning.

There was a time when the shopping mall came alive at Christmas.

The great department stores decorated their windows. Christmas trees rose through the atriums, covered in lights and ornaments. Music drifted through the corridors, mingling with the chatter of families and the excited cries of children. The shops were crowded, the cafés were full, and everywhere there was a sense of anticipation. Parents carried bags of presents. Children pressed their faces against the glass of toy displays. The smell of food, the glitter of decorations, and the warmth of the crowds combined to create something that seemed, at least for a few weeks each year, genuinely magical.

And somewhere, beneath an enormous Christmas tree, there was Santa Claus.

Children queued to sit on his knee, clutching their parents’ hands as they approached. Some were nervous, some were frightened, and others had prepared long lists of everything they hoped to receive. For a child, Santa was not a marketing strategy. He was magic made visible. He belonged to that extraordinary period of life when the world still held secrets, when imagination could transform an ordinary room into a kingdom and a man in a red suit into someone who seemed to know everything.

For families, the trip to see Santa was a ritual. It was something you did together, something you remembered, something that became part of the story of your childhood. You might forget the presents you bought that year, but remember the enormous tree, the crowds, the lights, and the excitement of standing in line.

The mall was a commercial enterprise, of course. Its purpose was to sell things. But it was also a gathering place, a theatre of everyday life, and a shared public experience. People came to shop, but they also came to participate in something larger than the transaction itself.

Then, gradually, the life began to drain away.

Department stores closed. Familiar shops disappeared. The crowds thinned, and the great Christmas displays lost some of their former grandeur. Shopping became something increasingly performed at home, alone, through a screen. Products that once required an afternoon among other people could now be ordered in seconds and delivered to the doorstep.

The convenience was undeniable. The experience, however, was not the same.

Today, a child can receive a present without ever entering a shop, watch Christmas films without leaving the bedroom, and see a thousand pictures of Christmas decorations without experiencing the excitement of standing beneath a magnificent tree surrounded by a crowd of strangers. Santa still appears in many shopping centres, and Christmas traditions continue in countless communities, but the old ritual has lost some of its place in everyday life.

The mall did not simply lose customers. In many places, it lost its role as a centre of communal experience.

And this is where a song written around the turn of the millennium begins to sound like a warning from another time.

Its lyrics describe a world in which Christmas has become shopping, shopping has become a god, and the future itself has taken on a distinctly disturbing character. What might once have sounded like an angry musician’s exaggeration now feels uncomfortably close to the world we have built.

The song’s refrain is stark:

“The future is X-rated.”

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about that line is that it can be understood as something much larger than a prediction about sexual explicitness. It suggests a future in which the boundaries surrounding human life have become increasingly porous, in which almost everything can be displayed, purchased, consumed, and sold.

And perhaps the question we should ask is not simply whether the future has become what the song predicted.

It is how we arrived here, and what we lost along the way.

When Christmas became a shopping god

The song captures its criticism of consumer culture in two brief lines:

“Now Christmas is for shopping”

“And the shopping god is everything”

These words describe a form of idolatry that reaches far beyond Christmas.

In the biblical tradition, idolatry is the elevation of something created into something that governs our lives. An idol need not be a statue. It can be money, power, status, pleasure, or anything else that becomes more important than the values it was supposed to serve.

Christmas offers a particularly revealing example because its commercial and spiritual meanings exist side by side.

For Christians, Christmas commemorates the birth of Jesus Christ. It is a celebration associated with hope, humility, generosity, and the arrival of God into the world in human form. For many others, it is a season of family, memory, kindness, and togetherness.

Yet the modern commercial calendar often presents Christmas as a problem to be solved through purchasing. Have we bought enough? Have we found the right presents? Have we decorated sufficiently? Have we made the occasion impressive enough?

The pressure to consume can overwhelm the experience it was supposed to enhance.

There is nothing inherently wrong with buying presents, enjoying material comforts, or making Christmas beautiful. Commerce can support traditions, create employment, and help families celebrate. The problem begins when the commercial activity becomes the principal purpose of the celebration.

We begin with a desire to express love and end by measuring that love through what we purchase.

We begin with a desire to create memories and end up worrying about whether the occasion looks good enough.

We begin by celebrating something meaningful and gradually become preoccupied with the shopping required to celebrate it.

The shopping god does not demand that we stop believing in family, love, or generosity. It simply encourages us to express those things through consumption.

And the more thoroughly we accept that arrangement, the harder it becomes to distinguish the meaning of an experience from the products sold in its name.

The death of the old Christmas mall matters because it reveals a contradiction at the centre of this culture. We have become extraordinarily efficient at purchasing Christmas while finding it increasingly difficult to preserve the shared experiences that once made it feel special.

We can deliver presents faster than ever. We can compare prices instantly. We can have almost anything brought to our door.

But convenience was never the reason Christmas mattered.

The old mall was not perfect, and nostalgia should not disguise its commercial purpose. Yet it demonstrated something important: a place built to sell things could still become a place where people gathered, where children experienced wonder, and where families created memories that had nothing to do with the price of a product.

What we have lost is not simply a particular kind of shopping. It is the recognition that human beings need places, rituals, and experiences that connect them to one another.

The devil punched down to the monkeys

Another image from the song is even stranger:

“The devil punched down to the monkeys”

It is a surreal description of a world in which something has gone fundamentally wrong. Human beings have developed extraordinary intelligence, built complex civilisations, and created technologies that would have seemed miraculous to previous generations. Yet the result is not necessarily greater wisdom or happiness.

We can communicate across the world instantly, but still struggle to communicate honestly with the people sitting beside us. We can access more information than any generation in history, but information does not automatically produce understanding. We can entertain ourselves without interruption, yet still find ourselves bored, restless, and dissatisfied.

The song’s imagery suggests a kind of inversion: the creatures capable of rising above their instincts have found increasingly sophisticated ways to serve them.

The internet did not invent greed, envy, lust, pride, or vanity. Those impulses have always been part of human nature. What the internet has done is give them new forms, new audiences, and new commercial opportunities.

Attention can be measured and sold. Desire can be personalised. Insecurity can be targeted by advertising. Anger can be turned into engagement. Loneliness can be converted into subscriptions.

A system designed to maximise revenue does not necessarily need to make people wiser, healthier, more fulfilled, or more compassionate. It needs to persuade them to continue using its services.

That distinction is crucial.

The problem is not that technology is inherently evil. Technology can educate, connect, heal, liberate, and inspire. The problem is that the incentives governing technology do not always align with the things that make human life meaningful.

When the most profitable behaviour is also the most compulsive, a society must decide whether profitability is sufficient justification.

The devil, in this interpretation, does not need to appear as a supernatural figure. He can be understood as a metaphor for temptation made systematic: an environment that identifies our weaknesses, learns how to exploit them, and rewards those who are most successful at doing so.

We do not have to be forced to make destructive choices if we can be encouraged to make them willingly.

From the shopping mall to the smartphone

The disappearance of the traditional Christmas mall and the rise of digital life are not identical developments, but they illuminate the same tension.

The mall brought people into a shared physical environment. Shopping online separates the transaction from that environment. The difference is not simply architectural. It changes the circumstances in which everyday life takes place.

In a shopping centre, people encountered things they had not planned to encounter. They saw other families, heard music, met friends, stopped for food, and participated in the atmosphere of a particular season. Even an ordinary trip could become a memory because the experience unfolded among other people.

Online, the experience is more personalised and controlled. The products appear according to our interests. The advertisements follow our preferences. The transaction can be completed without conversation, travel, or waiting.

There are real benefits to this arrangement, especially for people with limited mobility, busy schedules, or little access to physical shops. Online commerce is not inherently a cultural disaster, and the decline of some shopping centres also reflects economic pressures, changing consumer habits, and the failure of particular businesses.

Nevertheless, convenience has a cost when it becomes the only value we consider.

A physical journey can be inconvenient and still be worthwhile. Waiting in a queue can be frustrating and still be part of a memorable occasion. Spending an afternoon among other people can be less efficient than shopping online and infinitely more meaningful.

The trouble begins when we assume that the most efficient way to obtain something is necessarily the best way to experience it.

A photograph of a Christmas tree is not the same as standing beneath one. A video of a crowd is not the same as belonging to it. A delivery confirmation is not a substitute for the anticipation of a shared occasion.

We have become very good at obtaining things and risk becoming less attentive to the experiences through which those things acquire meaning.

The old mall, with all its commercial imperfections, was one of the places where those experiences could occur.

OnlyFans and the commercialisation of intimacy

The same transformation becomes more controversial when we move from shopping to human sexuality.

Platforms such as OnlyFans have made it possible for individuals to sell subscriptions to personal content, including sexually explicit material, directly to audiences. This has created new opportunities for some creators to earn money independently and exercise greater control over their work.

It would be wrong to assume that everyone who participates is exploited, that every subscriber is morally corrupt, or that adults lack the capacity to make their own decisions. The realities vary considerably from person to person.

Yet the wider cultural questions are difficult to ignore.

What happens when intimacy becomes a product? What happens when sexual attention can be measured in subscribers and revenue? What happens when financial incentives encourage people to turn increasingly personal aspects of their lives into commercial content? What happens when consumers become accustomed to treating access to another person’s body or attention as something that can be purchased?

These questions are not resolved simply by saying that the transactions are voluntary.

Voluntary choices deserve respect, but choices also take place within economic and cultural environments that influence what people consider desirable, possible, or necessary. Financial pressure, social comparison, expectations of success, and the promise of quick income can all affect decisions.

Nor does the existence of a market automatically tell us whether that market promotes human flourishing.

OnlyFans is not the whole story of modern society, but it illustrates a wider willingness to monetise things that previous generations might have regarded as belonging primarily to the private sphere.

Our attention is a commodity. Our appearance can become a brand. Our relationships can become content. Our personal experiences can become material for an audience.

Even vulnerability can acquire a market value.

The question is not whether every intimate image is wrong or whether sexuality should be hidden from public discussion. The question is what happens when commercial value increasingly determines how we understand ourselves and other people.

Human beings are more than their earning potential, their attractiveness, their sexual appeal, or their ability to command an audience.

Yet a marketplace has no automatic obligation to remind us of that fact.

Its function is to facilitate exchange. The moral responsibility for deciding what should be exchanged, under what conditions, and with what consequences belongs to the people and institutions that shape it.

The song’s refrain, “The future is X-rated,” therefore takes on a broader meaning. It becomes a question about a society in which the private can be made public, desire can be commercialised, and almost every aspect of the human experience can be turned into a product.

The danger is not simply that the future contains more explicit material. It is that we might gradually lose the ability to distinguish what can be sold from what ought to remain governed by dignity, responsibility, and respect.

The seven deadly sins and the machinery of modern life

The seven deadly sins offer a useful framework for understanding how this culture developed.

In Christian teaching, they describe fundamental tendencies that can corrupt human character when they become dominant. They are not merely ancient prohibitions. They are observations about the ways human beings can become enslaved to their own desires.

What is striking about modern consumer culture is how readily those tendencies can become profitable.

Greed: when everything becomes an opportunity for profit

Greed transforms the desire for security and prosperity into an appetite for accumulation without limit.

In the digital economy, attention, personal information, entertainment, intimacy, and social influence can all become sources of revenue. The question is no longer simply whether a product serves a useful purpose, but how much more can be extracted from its users.

Profit is not inherently immoral. Businesses need revenue to survive, and commercial activity can improve lives. But when financial return becomes the only meaningful measure of success, other values risk being treated as obstacles.

A society governed entirely by greed would struggle to explain why anything should ever be left unsold.

Lust: when desire becomes detached from responsibility

Lust, in the traditional Christian sense, concerns disordered desire rather than the mere existence of sexual attraction.

Sexuality can be part of love, intimacy, commitment, and human connection. It becomes a different matter when gratification becomes the overriding objective and another person is treated primarily as a means of satisfying it.

Digital platforms can make sexual stimulation immediate, personalised, and commercially scalable. The concern is not that every expression of sexuality is destructive, but that desire can be encouraged without equal attention to responsibility, mutuality, or the full humanity of the people involved.

Pride: when recognition becomes identity

The modern individual is encouraged to become visible, influential, and admired.

Social media allows people to express themselves and find communities, but it also makes public recognition unusually measurable. Followers, views, likes, and comments can begin to function as indicators of personal worth.

We increasingly face the temptation to construct a life that looks impressive rather than one that feels meaningful.

The old question, “Who am I?”, competes with another: “How many people are watching me?”

Envy: when comparison becomes a business opportunity

Advertising has long profited from dissatisfaction. Social media intensifies the process by surrounding us with images of other people’s bodies, homes, relationships, holidays, and apparent success.

We compare our private struggles with carefully selected public images. We feel inadequate, purchase products to improve ourselves, and display those improvements for others to see.

The cycle can continue indefinitely because there is always someone wealthier, more attractive, more popular, or apparently happier.

Envy is not simply an unpleasant emotion. It can become a powerful engine of consumption.

Gluttony: when enough is never enough

Gluttony traditionally concerns excessive consumption, but the underlying principle extends to almost any appetite.

We consume endless entertainment, videos, purchases, news, and stimulation. We move from one thing to another without pausing long enough to ask whether we have received anything of lasting value.

The problem is not pleasure itself. It is the inability to recognise when pleasure has become excess.

Sloth: when convenience replaces engagement

Sloth, in its deeper theological sense, includes spiritual indifference and the neglect of responsibilities, not merely physical laziness.

Modern convenience can be genuinely beneficial. But when every inconvenience becomes something to eliminate, we can lose patience for the activities that require sustained effort.

Friendship requires time. Family life requires sacrifice. Skills require practice. Community requires participation.

These things cannot always compete with instant entertainment, and their value often becomes apparent only after we have invested considerable effort in them.

Wrath: when anger becomes entertainment

Digital platforms can reward conflict because anger captures attention.

Outrage can generate views, shares, arguments, and influence. People are encouraged to react immediately, condemn publicly, and interpret disagreement as a personal attack.

Anger can be justified, particularly in response to injustice. But outrage cultivated primarily for attention can leave people permanently agitated without making them better equipped to solve the problems they care about.

Together, these seven sins reveal a troubling possibility: a society does not need to abandon morality explicitly to become organised around its opposite. It can simply build systems that reward the impulses people have always struggled to control.

The sins are ancient. The machinery that amplifies them is modern.

“Power’s just another one of those things”

The song also offers a provocative observation about power:

“It’s pointless if you ain’t gonna use it”

This line complicates the argument. The song is not merely complaining about a world that has changed. It also points towards the responsibility of those who inhabit it.

The internet has given ordinary people extraordinary capabilities. Individuals can publish their ideas, expose wrongdoing, build businesses, educate themselves, and find communities that might once have been inaccessible.

The same capabilities can be used to humiliate, manipulate, exploit, and deceive.

Power is not inherently virtuous or destructive. Its moral character depends partly on how it is exercised and on the incentives surrounding its use.

Consumers influence markets through their spending. Parents shape the values of their children through example. Creators influence culture through the work they produce. Companies make decisions about what behaviour to encourage and what consequences to ignore. Governments establish rules that can either protect people or leave them exposed.

No single person controls the whole system. Economic pressures, technological developments, corporate strategies, and public policy all play significant roles.

But neither are individuals entirely powerless.

Every culture is shaped, in part, by what people reward, tolerate, imitate, and pass on to the next generation.

If we believe that the world has become too commercialised, we must consider what we continue to purchase. If we believe that human relationships are becoming more superficial, we must consider how we spend our time. If we believe that children are losing opportunities for wonder, we must consider what experiences we create for them.

Criticism without responsibility becomes another form of entertainment: we complain about the world while continuing to reward the systems that sustain it.

The challenge is to turn dissatisfaction into action.

The future nobody consciously chose

How did we get here?

The answer is unlikely to be found in a single decision, a single company, or a single technological invention.

One business sought to increase sales. Another found a way to attract more attention. Consumers embraced the convenience of online shopping. Advertisers followed audiences. Platforms learned which content held people’s interest. Creators adapted to new opportunities. Regulators struggled to keep pace with developments that crossed borders and transformed familiar industries.

Each step could be justified on its own terms.

Online shopping saves time. Social media connects people. Digital platforms create economic opportunities. Personal freedom matters. Businesses have legitimate interests in making money.

Yet the cumulative consequences can be very different from the intentions behind individual decisions.

We rarely set out to dismantle a tradition. We simply stop participating in it. We rarely decide that a public gathering place is no longer important. We gradually find other ways to spend our time. We rarely announce that consumption has become the purpose of life. We simply begin organising more and more of our lives around purchasing, convenience, status, and stimulation.

Eventually, the extraordinary becomes ordinary.

That is why the song’s imagery feels so effective today. It captures the disorientation of watching familiar things change until the world becomes almost unrecognisable.

The future did not arrive in a single catastrophic moment.

We adapted to it gradually.

And adaptation is not the same as approval.

The loss of shared experience

The death of the old Christmas mall is particularly important because it represents something that cannot be measured through sales figures alone.

A society needs places where people can encounter one another without having to purchase a personalised digital experience. It needs public spaces, local traditions, community events, libraries, parks, places of worship, and celebrations that bring people together.

Not every gathering place must be commercial, and not every commercial space creates genuine community. But human beings need more than efficient transactions. They need shared experiences that give time and place a meaning beyond consumption.

The traditional Christmas mall, for all its imperfections, provided one such experience for many families.

The journey to see Santa involved anticipation. The decorations created atmosphere. The crowds made the occasion feel collective. The photographs became records of childhood. The ritual connected one Christmas to the next.

A child might remember those visits decades later, long after the presents had been discarded and the shops had changed.

That is what made the experience valuable.

Its worth was not confined to the products sold that day. It lived in the memories, relationships, and traditions that surrounded the transaction.

When such places disappear, communities can create new forms of gathering. The future does not have to reproduce the past exactly. But we should recognise what has been lost before assuming that convenience has made us better off in every meaningful sense.

We should ask whether our new systems are creating experiences worth remembering, or merely making it easier to move from one purchase to another.

The answer will not be the same for every person or community. Yet the question is essential.

A society that measures everything through efficiency risks overlooking the value of things whose importance lies precisely in the time, effort, and shared attention they require.

The biblical warning: what does it profit us?

The Bible repeatedly challenges the idea that material success is sufficient for a meaningful life.

In Mark 8:36, Jesus asks:

“What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

It is a question that cuts through the modern language of growth, productivity, influence, and personal branding.

What does it profit a person to gain wealth but lose peace? To gain attention but lose privacy? To become admired by strangers while neglecting the people closest to them? To accumulate possessions while losing the ability to appreciate what they already have?

What does it profit a society to become technologically advanced if its people become increasingly disconnected from one another?

These are not questions about whether modern life is entirely bad. Nor do they imply that the past was a morally superior age. Previous generations had their own injustices, hypocrisies, exploitation, and failures of compassion.

The biblical warning is more fundamental. It concerns the danger of allowing temporary goods to become ultimate ends.

Money is useful, but it cannot determine every question of value. Pleasure is part of life, but it cannot be the sole measure of a good life. Freedom matters, but freedom also brings responsibility. Technology can extend human capability, but it cannot tell us what those capabilities should serve.

The seven deadly sins endure as a moral framework because they recognise a persistent truth about human nature: the things that tempt us most are often the things we are most willing to justify.

We tell ourselves that everybody else is doing it. That the money is too good to refuse. That a new technology is inevitable. That if something is legal, popular, and profitable, it must be acceptable.

But legality does not settle every moral question, popularity does not establish wisdom, and profitability does not guarantee that something contributes to human flourishing.

A society needs moral principles that can evaluate the market rather than simply accepting whatever the market rewards.

Without them, we risk treating human beings as consumers first and people second.

Was the past better, or have we forgotten what matters?

It is tempting to look backwards and imagine that everything was better when the shopping malls were full, Christmas displays were magnificent, and families gathered around familiar rituals.

Nostalgia can be powerful because it preserves the emotional meaning of our memories. But it can also obscure the difficulties of the past. Traditional shopping centres were not accessible or welcoming to everyone, commercial Christmas could be excessive even in its heyday, and many people experienced loneliness and hardship long before the internet existed.

The aim should not be to romanticise an earlier age or reject everything that followed it.

We should preserve what was valuable, confront what was wrong, and question the assumption that every new development represents progress.

Technology has brought extraordinary benefits. Online commerce can save time and expand access. Digital communities can provide companionship and support. Greater personal freedom can allow people to escape restrictive circumstances and pursue opportunities unavailable to previous generations.

These benefits are real.

But progress should mean more than increasing the number of things we can do. It should also involve asking whether our capabilities are helping us live better lives.

A society can become wealthier while people feel lonelier. It can provide more entertainment while leaving people less satisfied. It can expand individual choice while creating powerful incentives that encourage people towards compulsive behaviour.

The solution is not to abandon modernity. It is to insist that modernity serves human beings rather than the other way around.

We need to ask what we want our technology to achieve, what our markets should be allowed to reward, and what kinds of relationships and communities we wish to preserve.

Most importantly, we need to remember that not everything valuable needs to be monetised.

The future is a choice, too

Perhaps the song’s greatest achievement is that it sounds less like a prediction than a warning.

Its images of commercialised Christmas, relentless noise, and a world becoming increasingly strange were already present in the culture around the year 2000. The internet did not create the seven deadly sins. It gave those ancient human tendencies new ways to reach us, measure us, and profit from them.

OnlyFans is one visible example of the wider commercialisation of human attention and intimacy. The decline of the traditional Christmas mall is another kind of symbol: a reminder that efficiency and convenience can displace experiences whose value cannot be captured by a transaction.

Neither development, taken alone, explains the condition of modern society. But together they invite us to consider a broader question about what happens when the logic of the marketplace extends into more and more areas of human life.

What happens when our private selves become products? When our desires become revenue streams? When shared rituals give way to individual consumption? When we measure success by what we can acquire, how many people notice us, or how effectively we can turn ourselves into a brand?

The danger is not that every new technology is evil or that every person who participates in a commercial platform has abandoned their values.

The danger is that we may lose sight of the difference between what is possible and what is worthwhile.

We can still choose differently.

We can support local businesses and community events. We can create Christmas traditions that are not defined by the price of presents. We can give children experiences that encourage imagination, patience, and connection. We can use technology without allowing it to dictate the rhythm of our lives. We can respect personal freedom while asking difficult questions about the economic systems that shape our choices.

We can choose to spend time with people rather than merely consuming content about them. We can practise restraint in a culture that encourages endless appetite. We can defend human dignity in a marketplace that sometimes reduces people to their commercial value.

These choices will not solve every structural problem. They will not bring back every closed department store or restore every lost tradition. But they can help establish a different set of priorities, both in our personal lives and in the institutions we build.

The old Christmas mall may never return in exactly the same form. Perhaps that is not the point.

What matters is whether we can recover the understanding that made it special: that the best experiences are not always the most efficient, that community requires physical and emotional presence, and that the purpose of a celebration is not simply to sell things but to bring meaning into people’s lives.

The future is not fixed merely because we have arrived at the present.

If our choices helped shape this world, our choices can help shape the world that follows.

And perhaps the greatest act of resistance in a culture that wants to monetise everything is to recognise that some things are worth protecting precisely because they are not for sale.

A child’s wonder at Christmas. A family tradition. A genuine friendship. An act of generosity. A moment of silence. A place where people gather simply because they belong there.

These are not insignificant remnants of a forgotten past. They are some of the things that make a future worth having.

The song’s refrain remains with us:

“The future is X-rated.”

Perhaps it is a warning about a culture that has become too comfortable with excess, too willing to turn desire into commerce, and too easily distracted