Luxury is something that is prized in some parts of the world as the goal. Aspirational. Glittery. Deeply expensive. And deeply unique, lush and exceptional. Luxury brands of everything from tea to clothes, diamond phone cases to 24k gold toilets… I have seen and experienced it all.
But, all of it is not really a luxury.
Don’t get me wrong, I love money and I love lovely things, but a luxurious lifestyle is only about 10% about amazing things and 90% about amazing energy. Energy like… safety, love, harmony, freedom, flow.
This is luxury. It’s what my extremely-wealthiest of clients and friends find themselves moving toward, divesting themselves of labels and looking for philanthropic causes, buying the sensibly nice car and trading a fancy watch for a trip around the world.
Stuff isn’t bad, unless that stuff owns you.
There’s a very odd trend that has taken hold.
People brag about being so busy.
The Atlantic reported recently:
“With this workaholic lifestyle, though, comes quite a bit of prestige, a perk that the researcher Silvia Bellezza, a professor of marketing at Columbia Business School, has found Americans to be all too aware of. Bellezza is the author, along with Georgetown’s Neeru Paharia and Harvard’s Anat Keinan, of a recent paper in the Journal of Consumer Research about the prominence of an unusual status symbol: seeming busy.”
Like my friend who worries about his art, managing the care of multiple homes, fretting over the markets, living on the edge of a crisis… yet already with so much abundance and zero time to . The many people I know who are so busy chasing a lifestyle of things that they don’t live a life of experiences.
It’s not luxury. And it happens on a small scale and a large scale.
Workaholics are not more productive. There’s a certain point where you’re not in your genius zone and you’re just idly spending time and not really making, creating or working… and so, that time spent “at work” is somehow just wasted. Relationships, friendships, wellness and many other dreams and plans often get lost in a workaholic drive.
If you work too much (and you know if you do) dare yourself to make more space in your life.
Fill that space with nothing but fun or simply nothing but laying around on the lawn or doing things that are purely restorative. This is a luxury.
People are more important than stuff. Nothing matters more. I would give every last penny for another day with the people who have left the planet. Would you? I bet you would. It’s not a dark perspective- it’s a real perspective. Holding on to things that are problems masked as luxuries – like too much stuff just in case you might need it one day, too many responsibilities for the sake of prestige rather than passion, too much striving to get x,y,z “object” that is lovely but not really as awesome as seeing the world or making dreams come true.
It’s safer sometimes to focus on things. It is more certain than an adventure, or a dream that may not fully come true, you know? But it’s a luxury to focus on these things, and if you put your resources and your energy into the people and experiences you love, you’ll always come out on top in fulfillment, ad this is big science!
Efficiency creates freedom. It really does. When you scale down on stuff, you see you really don’t need that much. It’s the greatness of minimalism. What would happen if you scaled back your needs to the essentials that you really loved? It’s like being subscribed to every online paid channel- Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, etc… but you only have time to watch one. We do this with media, with technology (I bet you could delete 10 apps and feel no difference!) with appointments and even email subscriptions. We are loaded with stuff and messages and mandates to use so much stuff, or that we need so much stuff to be healthy or informed, or in style or culturally relevant. Chop it down to what you truly need and see what happens to your time and your lifestyle!
Living smaller is living larger. In every way.
How much passion do you have in your life? This is the metric I am most interested in. Being full of passion. Feeling rested enough to deeply enjoy seeing my loved ones, my friends and meeting new people. Having things on my schedule that are so thrilling (especially the time to work on new passion projects) that I am excited to wake up in the morning every day! Passion isn’t just handed to us- we are all the creators of this space and time and energy, and it’s a deep luxury to have this space and time!
How much free time do you have? No matter how much you need to hustle right now- and I have done 6-jobs-at-once hustling just to pay the bills in the past every month- free time is where the inspiration and the joy arrives. In the midst of my biggest years of hustling, I found the book The Artists Way and started taking time each week to go on Artist Dates, to do writing, to be at the beach… and these are the days I remember most and how I remember spending most of my time. Free time is luxurious. And you deserve in in mind, body and spirit.
Create yourself a life where you can have the luxuries you want— and a lifestyle where you can enjoy them all. There is nothing wrong with wanting anything material. There’s nothing wrong with the most materially luxurious things. But, they are not you. They are fun, expressive, exquisite… and as long as you are the most self-expressed, fulfilled and truly peacefully connected to love along the way, it’s quite the extraordinary journey toward anything you are creating.
Live with that deeply luxurious awesomeness. Freedom, creativity, peace, joy, love. You may be surprised how much actual material gifts and abundance arrive in that state of mind and life.
xoxo Dana
P.S.: If you’re ready to take the energy around you to the next level, detox the negativity and make space for joy, the Joy Immersion: 30 Day Negativity Detox is here for you.
THE JOY IMMERSION is a commitment to happy-making, mirror-polishing, life-lifting and simple space shifting for 30 days. It’s loaded with lots of actions that can help you detox from your own negative stuff, uncover more of your greatness and light, and see happiness everywhere you look…!
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Gather up your magic & make gorgeous dreams come true!
xoxo Dana
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