So yeah, I read a book by a an amazing scholar who I admire so much. um his name is David Clotier and he wrote a book called The Vice of Luxury and it is an excellent academic work doing a bunch of ground laying um to recover ancient Christian and classical notion that luxury is a vice on par with all the other vices that we recognize. greed, sloth, lust, anger. Um, the thing that's interesting to me is like with greed, the classical Greeks, ancient Christians, contemporary modern people, we recognize why it's bad to be greedy.
The greedy person is a bad person. And it's obvious why a greedy person is a bad person. But we stand in a very different relationship to the to luxury as a quality of persons. Like that is an attitude to the world where you have an excessive desire for highly refined things that bring comfort, pleasure, ease, convenience, novelty. Um, in the modern world, anything that promotes my personal ease, convenience, gives me a new experience, changes things up is attractive.
It's marketed to me as attractive. And people who live luxury lifestyles where their built environment accommodates those things for them, they're they're admirable people. I want to be like them. I want to emulate them. In the ancient world, that was clearly recognized as a vice on par with greed. So, how is it that we share with them this common view that the greedy person is a bad person? But we've departed in the sense that they would have said the person who luxuriates is also a bad person.
And now to luxuriate makes you um admirable. It makes you somebody others want to emulate. I want to live the the lifestyle of the rich and famous. I want to live the lifestyle of the influencer. Um so that's where the book came from. It's that that kind of fundamental question. uh David Cloier has done a lot of really excellent academic work kind of um building that the case and the historical case, the socioeconomic case for why luxury should be considered a vice.
But I'm interested in exploring those ideas and translating them for your everyday person. Um, how can how can those ideas kind of be filtered and sifted through to provide practical insights? When people are asking themselves questions about their own money management, how should I spend my money? What should I put? What should I dedicate my resources to? Should I be striving all the time to make my life yet more comfortable, full of more novelty, full of more and newer and different experiences? or should I essentially put some limits on myself in those areas and where should those limits be and why in the world should I put limits on myself like if I should why because I think in many ways we've we've lost the logic of why we should it's my money as long as I made it fairly and didn't exploit anybody to get it and I worked hard for it like don't I deserve it I That's a very common thought.
And so, um, the goal of the book is to really maybe help people see why we should still take luxury seriously as a vice. That is there is there a certain amount of ease and pleasure and convenience is not a bad thing, but the vice is when you go to excess. And we should be concerned about that point beyond which it is excess. Um and so where is that? Can we help define it? Can we help people in their discernment in their own life of what is excess and why their life would actually be better if they weren't excessively desirous of those things.
And so giving too much of their energy, attention, and surplus resources to those things because it really is one way of putting about it is it's about opportunity costs. You are gaining something in terms of excess pleasure, convenience, novelty, status. That's I haven't said that, but luxury is very often connected to social status. But you're also giving up other things that maybe aren't as obvious. And um my goal would be to help people name those things and understand why they're valuable and when they're making that trade off.
