Ponderings on Luxury & Discipline

After another trip to New York this weekend and really puzzling through how anyone at any stage in their life hangs onto money in that city, I started pondering – in true Carrie Bradshaw fashion – about luxury. What is luxury? Is it all about the amount that you pay for something, a good or a service, or is luxury more closely tied to things that you truly enjoy and treating yourself to them. To satisfy my curiosity, I discovered that the etymology of the word luxury stems from the Latin luxus for excess. (one of my dream jobs would be the lexiconographers with the NYT mag). Both meanings are in the dictionary – the condition of abundance, having excess, or more than enough for your own comfort – and the condition of indulging oneself in something that provides pleasure. Still, an indulgence at least implies excess – the idea that you don’t need it, but you let yourself have it.

I’m prepared to contemplate some more positive definitions of what I deem luxurious. I hope always to have little luxuries in my life – but I would never aspire to excess. Ultimately I think of luxury more like a scale – that tips towards excess on the far end. It’s a recurring thought in my mind when I go shopping – that I could never spend certain amounts of money on certain items. For me, a nice $100 handbag that I don’t buy at Target is a luxury. The $500 Kate Spade bag I really salivate over is just plain excess. With the new budget, I have to get serious about discipline too. So I will probably be putting off both luxuries and excess purchases of any kind!