UNPACKING LUXURY

The Luxury of Spirit, Time, and Culture

When you hear or read the word, “Luxury”, what’s the first thing you think of? Here are TSB, we feel we’ve been mislead into understanding the term in a skewed, unfair, and naive- maybe ignorant way. We live in a world where a banana taped to a wall is praised and valued in the millions as a “Luxury” fine art item… *We’re actually not bashing the idea, and in it being unique, we think its dope… worth millions, maybe not, but it is a cool idea— yeah.

We’ve been defining our concepts of luxury by false pretenses. These pretenses are based off of a predatory nature toward naivety. In saying that, TSB is commenting on the landscape in which the word “Luxury” is attached to a monetary value and not necessarily anything of substance. 

For instance, think about Gucci’s T-shirts. A Gucci T-shirt can be sold, by the company, for $500— mainly based off of the fact that they can get away with it. There’s actually nothing “special” about the shirt— the brand, yes— sure. However, NEWSFLASH, that T shirt is made in a Chinese factory. (We love the Chinese factories! However, if we were making garments there, you wouldn’t be buying them for 100,000% profit… awesome for business, but at a point the practice is just absurd—especially when there are solutions like being creative and making a different product…) Furthermore, those same T-shirts are made again, but without Gucci branding on them, and sold in the non-commercial markets for a 10th of a fraction of the price that the major brands are charging. With this said, it’s important to really think about what luxury is. 

According to Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, The word, “Luxury,” is “a condition of abundance or great ease and comfort… Something adding to pleasure or comfort but not absolutely necessary.” We could agree that both of these definitions are inadvertently correlatable to the concept of being in a heightened state of happiness; The things that are luxuries make us happy, and in most cases, make our lives more pleasurable. In the same breath, these two definitions are in conflict with one another. Where one definition mainly insinuates decadence in one’s life experience, the other definition insinuates that luxury is not necessarily important. Here at The Secular Bible, we would like to unpack and innovate the way we approach the idea of “Luxury” and argue that luxury is crucial and should be an essential part of everybody’s life experience. Luxury needs to be standardized. For example, in 2020, everybody on the planet should have a toilet. A toilet is a luxury. Toilets are in abundance, and yet they’re made exclusive through pricing constructs. That needs to change. Luxury should be free. In our new understanding of luxury, we’re going to standardize the toilet, and create tiers of luxury (which will keep things exciting and prevent people from being lazy). There’s standard luxury, and then there’s designer luxury— you gotta pay fah dat. If somebody has an ALLAHMODE toilet, that’s a different level of luxury. Again, “Luxury” should not be defined by a monetary value, because monetary values are extremely subjective. Money is a made up value system. We could write a whole other article on that another day. However, there are material and intangible things that hold an objective value— mainly due to their scarcity. To illustrate: How rare is a precious stone… How rare is a couture dress… How rare is your best friend… These are the questions that we need to begin to ask when we think about how luxurious an experience is. 

As mentioned above, Merriam Webster defined luxury by a condition of abundance or greater ease and comfort of pleasure and satisfaction. So, the crackhead who looks at you wrong from the other side of the street obviously is not a luxurious experience. However, the friend, vehicle, bag, drugs, and whatever else you can’t go without, is a true luxury. Fundamentally, The most extreme luxury is spirit, and the thing we should value most are people— each individual is more rare than anything else on this planet. Then, from there, we can apply value on that one-of-a-kind mountainside post-modern minimalistic villa… yknow? 

Is it just us or do you also feel that today’s modern society, has become confused about what luxury is; as being controlled by monetary values and not defined by scarcity. Embracing this understanding of luxury will only do two things— one good, one bad. On the sour side, boring people with money won’t be cool anymore. Yet, on the bright side, people who add to our quality of life will be loved… and yes, that insinuates that we can’t speak for people who subtract to OUR quality of life. We also cant be grossly subjective in defining who subtracts from our quality of life— but there should be a list for them. We will say this, rapist and people who murder innocent people should be among the first to be written in… yeah? 

Following this method of defining luxury may mean that profits are controlled— in a way, but the landscape becomes more colorful and competitive.

How bout it. What do you think folks?

-AJ 17:29 10/26/20