Luxury = Pain

Yeah... I know it’s a paradox many would be totally confused reading... “How can luxury ever be pain? Luxury is actually maximum comfort!!”... But the co-existence of the yin & the yang cannot be denied, even in luxury.
It’s the fear of death that makes us lust for Amrit... Our love for Lakhmi comes from our fear of pain of Alakhmi...

To understand the true worth and value of luxury, one has to know what pain is... and having undergone pain to acquire it, makes it even more precious.

People go through various troubles in life in order to acquire the luxurious lifestyle that they seek. Office ladies in Korea are known to starve for the whole month and blow up their entire month’s salaries on a LV bag. As per Radha Chadda’s book, Japanese teenagers sleep with rich executives just so that they can afford a LV or a Prada bag.
If in this case, luxury is Lakshmi, then the ache that people have gone through in order to acquire it is the alakhmi.

Looking at the noveu riche, the hardwork, struggle and hardships that one goes through to be where they are, makes the ability to be able to afford those luxuries much sweeter.

Now, one would argue, what about the old rich...who are so accustomed to luxury that it almost has become a routine for them. Well, no wonder that this section of society is now looking at going back to the basics... it’s they who take to meditation – silence is luxury... it’s they who go most on sabbaticals to ‘secret hideouts’ that are unheard of by ‘normal’ people – personal time is luxury... Ask any of these old rich people what they’d most like to have... and they’ll tell you ‘peace of mind’... And well, they do spend thousands of dollars trying to get that!!
So what’s the yin and what’s the yang here??!! Materialistic Luxury itself is the yang and that makes you value the yin – the softer, basic luxuries of life.
Just like in any relationship...where deprivation and a feeling of loss are the biggest factors that make one realize the true value of the relationship, it’s these very factors that change one’s definition of luxury making something more aspirational than something else. For a teenager who’s always lived with parents in a secure environment, living independently may seem like a luxury... but for one living abroad, away from home... luxury is that one friend who reminds him of home! People's relationships with luxury, work on that same basic principle...

Another example of co-existance of yin & yang...

... someone’s gain is somebody else’s loss... A handmade expensive embroidered leather bag, puts through pain not only the artisan sweating it out on making the bag, but also the environment. Honestly, looking at the way the luxury leather industry slaughters animals, puts me to shame. Rare animals like Ostrich and crocodiles are murdered to create one expensive bag for a rich socialite... for whom the skin of the dead animal is luxury. And the respect that the company pays for the pain it caused to the poor animal is by pricing it realllly high! Hermes recently announced that they are planning to now raise crocodiles, in-house, so that the supply of leather continues to come, now that crocodiles have entered the list of endangered species. Talk about paining the environment!

Then there’s the pain that the creator’s go through... If the designers didn’t take the pains, if these so called ‘luxury’ products weren’t ‘hand-made’, if there was any less attention to detailing, if the designers didn’t travel the world, rack their brains and innovate to come up with newer ideas every season, would they have been luxury at all?

Hence, I feel that the entire concept of Luxury is based on the simple human truth – the principle of the yin & yang... But what’s the yin & what’s the yang, is up to everyone’s own personal interpretation!