The Life (and Work) of Luxury

This summer, my daughter and I started to tour colleges. In June, we went to western Massachusetts to look at Smith, Mount Holyoke, and Amherst. In July, we stayed closer to home and went to look at Bryn Mawr and Swarthmore.

Before each tour, we met our potential student tour guides. They introduced themselves by sharing their major, minor, and extracurricular activities. And my god, the extracurricular activities! Sports, clubs, student government positions, internships, jobs, volunteer opportunities... and all that on top of attending elite liberal arts colleges and pursuing multiple fields of study.

I listened with fascination—and felt exhausted just thinking about their schedules.

My knee-jerk analysis had me bemoaning the systemic influences that lead students to engage in the resume-padding grind that identifies in Can't Even:

Millennials became the first generation to fully conceptualize themselves as walking college resumes. With assistance from our parents, society, and educators, we came to understand ourselves, consciously or not, as “human capital”: subjects to be optimized for better performance in the economy.

I think Petersen is spot on, and I absolutely believe that this worldview colors the life of any college student today. But could I be missing something? I started to wonder whether there was a more joyful and energizing way to imagine the lives of these students.

At Swarthmore, we learned about their "cash-free campus" policy. Essentially, there are no out-of-pocket expenses at Swarthmore. The cost of attending (which is extremely high but typically offset considerably by aid) completely covers anything and everything a student wants to do. There's a substantial credit for books and other necessary supplies. The school fully funds student clubs, including expenses like travel, hotel, and entry fees for groups like the ski club and outdoor club. Students even get credits for the local grocery coop, free laundry, SEPTA passes for getting around the region, and compensation for unpaid internships off-campus.

Swarthmore creates an environment where students have little else to consider besides their studies and activities.

Now, I'm not naïve. It's not like these perks are 'free.' They're funded by tuition dollars and the school's endowment. It takes hard work and quite a bit of luck to secure a spot at this type of institution. Yet, once a student enrolls, they're ushered into a utopian period of possibility—one in which carrying a double major, a varsity sport, numerous club memberships, and a position in student government doesn't have to be exhausting. Okay, I'm probably a little naïve...

So far, all the schools we've looked at have similar policies, if not stated as succinctly as Swarthmore's. Granted, we've been looking at a very particular kind of school—highly selective liberal arts colleges with field hockey teams. They are schools that now make a concerted effort to recruit and support students from a wide range of backgrounds. But they're schools that were nonetheless built on the spoils of colonialism, capitalism, and generational wealth. Even when divested from natural resource extraction or the military-industrial complex, their endowments are undoubtedly invested in short-termist shareholder capitalism because all roads lead to the stock market.

With that significant caveat in mind, I started to think about how I might spend my time—and what ways I might contribute to the community—without the ever-present friction of existing in a profit-obsessed economic system. If I didn't have to worry about how I'd meet my own needs, what more could I create, experience, learn, and share? And what would 'more' even look like outside the productivity paradigm?

As Astra Taylor puts it, "The security of having our needs met allows us to have real autonomy and creative agency in the world." What are my actual needs? And how might I imagine the most frictionless ways to meet them so I can experience true autonomy and creative agency?

Twenty years removed from college and many years into deconstructing my personal beliefs around success and achievement, I heard these students enumerate their interests and interpreted each list as calculated striving—"a form of personal insurance against future risk," writes Taylor. That is, after all, the water I swim in.

Asking myself how these students might experience their very full lives joyfully rather than as a cost-benefit analysis, I was reminded of Helen Hester and Nick Srincek's proposals for 'public luxury.' Public luxury reconfigures public accommodations as services or spaces of last resort into services and spaces of the utmost quality.

Public luxury hinges on an economic system driven not by having but by experiencing, participating, and creating. The college campus is often an experience of public luxury—even at schools with much smaller endowments than Swarthmore. Of course, the experience of that public luxury is time-limited. College students eventually graduate into the 'real world.'

The 'real world,' however, isn't just the way things are. It's the way we've made it to be. The real world can be reimagined. While sweeping structural change might be beyond our reach as individuals, we each have the power to reimagine our own realities—our own real worlds—to be more luxurious.

We can reframe luxury, as Hester and Srincek propose, from exclusivity to quality.

Instead of propelling constant growth and the degradation of the environment as a luxury based on exclusivity does, we might base our concept of luxury on quality and imagining “life beyond mere necessity.”

Luxury can be detaching from the habits that cause us to do more so that we can have more. Luxury can be recognizing that we don't need or even want some of what we already have. Luxury might be letting go of goals that prevent us from having more meaningful experiences.

We can define what constitutes the 'real world' for ourselves, which has a massive impact on the way we work:

• What are you currently working toward that hinders your experience of luxury?

• What limits have you put on yourself or your work based on assumptions about the 'real world?'

• What do you have more than enough of? What feels scarce?

A 'real world' shaped by public luxury might seem like an impossible target, too big a change to become reality. That's often the reaction to utopian visions. However, the key is to realize that utopia is always a work in progress. Luxury can be too. By reorienting life and work toward a vision of luxury, even in a very small way, we make take a step toward a better future—one that has the power to build into a joyful revolution.