Episode 84. Luxury—Once Enjoyed— Becomes a Necessity

What in life deserves our time and attention and what things don't. I hope that as we consider that question along with other topics on this show, that we can all learn to live our lives just a little more intentionally. This is Seth Roberts. Thanks for joining me on Skipping Stones - “Luxury, Once Enjoyed, Becomes a Necessity.”

I worry about having nice things sometimes. Not because I don't want them, but because I worry that I won't be able to stand living without them. Why is the pain of losing something so much greater and long lasting than the satisfaction we get from first acquiring a thing? The saddest thing about having nice things is that they become commonplace over time.

The first time I bought a car that was newer than 10 years or so felt like an incredible upgrade to me. I was ecstatic. Now I've acclimated to having something much nicer, and the idea of having less sounds painful to me. The rich often rightly sound out of touch with reality when they start saying things like, oh, I could never shop at Walmart.

You need to treat yourself. Go take a vacation. We want to emulate these people's self-care routines and we want to indulge in the comforts they take for granted, but the average person just doesn't have the means or the time to do all of that, so we make do with far less, I'm not sure a quote, average family can even afford a trip to Disney World anymore.

It is easy to acclimate to luxury, to the point that life without luxury sounds excruciating, even though just some years prior in life, living without them was probably fine and we probably didn't care. We probably at one point, scoffed at the people that had things that we didn't, but behaved as if they couldn't live without them.

Once upon a time people were happy to have a meal for the day, and in some places that still is all that matters maybe to be happy in this world, what we really need is to find a way to detach ourselves from the rat race that the pursuit of possessions forces us into. Chasing after the next thing is exhausting.

It's no wonder people feel like they work and they work and then they die. Because they do. We look for what's not presently available to us, and we use it as a driver to move forward in life. But maybe when we do that, we're robbing ourselves of the pleasure we could be experiencing if we just reminded ourselves more often of the joys of having the possessions we already have.

It seems like such a simple formula. More things, status, power, et cetera, equals more happiness. But that really doesn't seem to be the case. Just about every documentary of just about every celebrity I've ever seen talks about deep bouts of depression. So clearly all the luxuries in the world doesn't seem to make everything better.

Comfort so easily becomes our crutch. It can almost become a kind of prison. Once we're acclimated pretty soon after we have it, we refuse to be happy without it. We slowly chip away at our ability to be happy with less. In a strange way, it's our discomforts that keep us grounded and free. We all seem to want to resist the very notion that hard things can be good for us, but they are.

Our discomforts have the capacity to give us perspective and to make us more empathetic to people that have less. I think about what it means to be spoiled, which is what so many of us, rich and poor have become. I think anyways, it seems to me to mean we've lost perspective. A perfect example of a spoiled person is the person that takes from life,  not with gratitude, but with a sense of entitlement.

A spoiled person is the person that insists them having more is because they think they deserve it. But who really deserves the thing anyway? What truly makes a person deserving of anything? Does being smarter, richer, or more beautiful entitle you to more? Is that truly what makes us deserving? I believe what makes a person deserving is whether or not they can make use of a thing and be grateful for it. 

I know people that fear not being relevant to the world more than they fear the misery that that pursuit drives them to. If they're not working on big things or are around powerful people, they think they are not living. But as much as those people have influence over the actions of many, they have little to no influence over people's souls, which at the end of the day, I think is probably the only thing truly worth having an impact on.

Which at the end of the day, I think is probably the only thing truly worth having an impact on. Since the soul is the part of us that lies outside of the actions we take to simply survive and experience pleasure. I can't help but feel like the people that have the real advantage in life are not the smart ones, the good looking ones, or even the rich ones, but the ones that know how to smile at the little things around them.

The greatest contributors to this world, in my opinion, are the ones that can appreciate it. What is the value of the beautiful world we live on? If it's simply a thing to be conquered or endured, instead the world we live on is a place to be admired. As history drudges forward, people will force change upon it.

And the people that force the most change will be the best remembered for a time. But I think the people that found a way to enjoy the process of living are the people that have actually won the game of life. The world doesn't need more conquerors, it needs more admirers. There will always be things you want in  life that you won't have, whether that is a different president in office, a Ferrari fame, or the admiration of your peers.

So in theory, you will always be left wanting more, but if you are capable of seeing what you have and appreciating it, you become the king or queen of your mortal existence because you hold the greatest power of all, which is power over your own joy. In life, joy is simply not something that just happens.

It is something that we have to actively choose to practice. It is as much an intentional action we take as it is a result of our present circumstances. I don't know what I would do if I lost everything, but I try to remind myself of when I had nothing and was content. Loss of any sort is always going to hurt.

But I hope we have it in us to remember that we can and have been happy with less. If we could never live  without our luxuries. Are we truly worthy of having them? The secret to life seems to be less about acquiring new things, but more about learning to smile. Even when we don't have them. This is Skipping Stones- “Luxury, Once Enjoyed, Becomes a Necessity.”

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