The Life We Keep Putting Off

Why is it always about what we can't afford?

At a dinner table recently someone asked the question: what is luxury to you?

Everyone went around answering. Is it collecting expensive watches or branded bags? Being able to afford fine dining without worrying about the bill? Is it being able to fly first or business class instead of getting cramped in coach, sacrificing comfort for savings?

Nobody talked about time. Nobody talked about presence. Nobody talked about the freedom to be unhurried. To wake up without dread. To choose what deserves your attention today and quietly decline everything that doesn’t. To not sell your hours cheaply out of anxiety.

And I kept thinking about that on the drive home. Because if luxury is only ever about what we can consume, what we can own, what we can afford — then most of us will spend our whole lives feeling like we’re just short of it. Always one raise away. One promotion away. One good year away from finally feeling like we’ve arrived.

Luxury of presence is the most expensive thing in the world. Because to afford it means we need to give up luxury as we know it.

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I’ve been interviewing writers and travelers for a while now and I keep noticing the same pattern.

Alicia sold everything she owned. Went from a three bedroom house to two backpacks. No car. No insurance. No bills. She convinced her husband — who used to work fourteen hour days and was barely home — to give up his income and travel the world with her full time. Most people heard that and called it reckless.

But here’s what Alicia told me. Her husband’s father worked his whole life. Retired. And died before he got to do a single thing he had planned.

That’s what staying on the first curve too long looks like.

Flavio Massignan is a chemist from Budapest. He went to India for forty days because two of his friends were getting married there. That was the whole plan. He ended up on an empty beach outside Vizag with a family of cousins who hadn’t seen each other in years, listening to stories about sneaking away on scooters when they were teenagers. He didn’t book that moment. He just showed up.

Two very different people. Same shift in thinking.

They both stopped defining luxury by what they could consume and started defining it by how they could be present.

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Arthur Brooks writes about this in From Strength to Strength. He talks about two curves in a life.

The first is about achievement. You climb. You build. You trade time for money and tell yourself it’s temporary. Someday, you say. Someday I’ll have enough. Someday I’ll travel. Someday I’ll write the thing I keep meaning to write.

But the second curve is where purpose lives. Where you stop accumulating and start contributing. Where legacy begins. Not the legacy of what you owned but of what you gave. What you noticed. What you said out loud that someone else needed to hear.

Most people miss the second curve entirely. Not because they don’t want it. Because they never stop running the first one long enough to find it.

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I’ll be honest with you. I have not seen Jaipur. Not been to any of the places in my homeland that Flavio traveled. And like Alicia I have always dreamt of leading a life of traveling the world and being in the moment, blending in with the local culture. But I haven’t been able to do any of that.

While I am waiting for enough savings and having time, Flavio gave himself forty days and two wedding invitations and came back with forty stories. Alicia gave herself permission to say yes to a house sit in Australia she couldn’t really afford and it rerouted her entire year. Morocco. South Korea. Wales. Japan. All of it started with one yes to one thing that wasn’t in the plan.

They chose time over money. Not by giving up everything — but by stopping the slow trade of hours for things they didn’t need.

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Here’s what I keep coming back to from that same dinner.

When you have money, luxury is about where you spend it.

When you understand time, luxury becomes something else entirely. It becomes the forty days in India. The house sit in a suburb of Wales you’d never otherwise see. The empty beach with strangers who become family for an afternoon.

It becomes writing the thing you’ve been meaning to write.

The shift isn’t about having less. It’s about wanting differently.

From consumption — look what I have — to presence — look where I am. Look who I’m with. Look what I’m finally paying attention to.

That’s the trade. And nobody can make it for you.

What I didn’t realise until the next morning was that we had already answered the question that night — without knowing it.

These were our closest friends. People we hadn’t seen in over six months. From eight in the evening to midnight we talked, reminisced, laughed, reconnected. We had four cameras between us. We never turned one on.

Nobody suggested a photo. Nobody reached for a phone. We were just there.

We had accidentally chosen presence over consumption. No documentation. No proof it happened. Just four people in a room being completely unhurried with each other.

That’s the luxury nobody thought to mention when we went around the table. And we stumbled into it without even trying.¹

The question we should have asked — that nobody asked — is this: What are we spending our time on? And is it worth what we’re paying?

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For Further Reading…

Business class champagne, a lounge bar at 35,000 feet, a Tesla with 23% charge. It's easy to mistake all of that for luxury. But somewhere between Nashville and Cochin, I think I found the real thing. More on that

1. Cover photo by Katarina Bubenikova on Unsplash