> they will finally get the respect they deserve.
I believe this is a big part of it. With the rise of corporations and media, we have seen a loss of any sort of public commons. A consequence of that is that I think many people here in the US don't feel like they are part of a community. They don't feel seen by any sort of meaningful tribe, outside of their job, which is transactional and subject to the whims of corporate overlords.
So much pathological behavior in society today makes sense when seen through the lens of "this is a person who feels isolated screaming out for any kind of acknowledgement of their existence".
In addition to these reasons, there is the economic side. They're spending money on frivolous but attainable luxury items because the traditional economic path of a house and family seems impossibly out of reach.
You can save for 6 months to buy a car mod for 1500, but when local median house price is $1,000,000 they may feel like it's pointless to even attempt being a home owner.
Except people have been doing obnoxious shit to feel better about themselves since forever ago. Look two hundred years back and you will see European men duelling each other over the most random stuffs. If anything, I'd say I am seeing less modded cars and hearing less bikes with more decibels than jet engines than I did 20 years ago.
I feel like you just grasping to any social phenomenon to try to insert your own agenda.
Dueling is a very different phenomenon. Duels were typically done away from urban centers and involved only the participants. They were not done to annoy other random people.
I'm no expert, but you could do a whole deep dive on the sociology behind dueling to get a better sense of what socioeconomic conditions led to it.
Just saying "the stegosaurus is like a peanut butter cookie" to establish an analogy doesn't immediately confer wisdom. An analogy has to actually be between things that have meaningful similarity. If we were, say, talking about street racing for pink slips, then maybe the dueling analogy would be more useful.