I don’t admit this in my professional life because I have to suffer through it regularly, but I hate the interminable debate around ‘what is luxury?’ Honestly, who cares? If a significant number of people care, you probably aren’t even talking about luxury anyway.
It’s not so much the topic of the debate that’s boring – it’s more that we fight it out by comparing products, materials and experiences against each other to work it out, as if subjectivity isn’t a thing. She says, ‘it came from a place that you can only get to by bicycle or horse’. He says, ‘but it was made slowly by this left-handed person who worked under Rene Redzepi’. They says ‘but this is made from a totally circular process and the packaging can be melted down to make a toy for kids to play with instead of watching Youtube.’ Boring.
If you ever get to read Jack Self’s article The End of Ideas in Real Review you should. The luxury industry is fascinating and kind of diabolical. Crazy wealth and crazy people all stirred up. … but we don’t talk about that as much because it makes us feel like we’ve been tricked. The human motivations underlying our concepts of luxury are interesting too. I boil it down to the basic premise that everybody needs what they want and wants what they need. That’s also hard to talk about because it makes us feel dumb.
Where I can begin to get interested in luxury is thinking about where and when it might exist even if we don’t call it luxury, and what happens to people when they are exposed to these kinds of conditions which, by definition, are not what everybody else experiences.
Recently I’ve been visiting remote places for work: Hobart in Tasmania and Fremantle in West Australia. They’re both edge places where you can’t but look from the known into the unknown. Your sense of being on an island looking out at something bigger than you can understand is ever-present: the unmapped ocean, the rest of the world, culture at-large, fish with those dangly lights on their head... everything is ‘out there’.
If luxury is something deeply enjoyable and that most people don’t have, I am beginning to believe that being on an island is a kind of meta-luxury composed of all these subtle sub-luxuries that change how you think and feel.
For a start, just knowing that you are not at the centre of things has an intrinsic value. Islanders are curious, they are explorers in both a physical and intellectual sense, constantly imagining the ‘out there’ and reflecting upon their relationship with the rest of the world. It’s not surprising that Japan, an island nation, has a culture where the individual is not at the centre, and relationships with others are a more important focus. In a world that is relentlessly driven by individual exceptionalism, feeling like you are not the main event is luxurious.
From their position on an edge, islanders seem more critical and capable of building different or unique perspectives. Perhaps it’s because not every idea can reach the islands or survive on them. Continental big city people are steamrolled by culture every day. Events and information occur so fast and regularly that there is no time to think about whether the content is good or true – things happen to you. The extra space and lower tempo of an island’s ideasphere creates the luxuries of clarity, perspective and mental independence.
Of course, it is true that there are 24 hours of time per day on an island just as anywhere else, but time is also a feeling and the impact of your mental clarity and autonomy can often present as the feeling of having more time – perhaps the most precious luxury there is.
I am a city guy and I love the sweaty centre, but I am interested in whether you have to be on an island to be an islander? I’ve been trying to bring back a little island luxury every time I return from work at the edge and it never lasts long, but maybe luxury is something that is always just a little out of your reach.