On Aging and Luxury

I recently heard a doctor define aging as “the pursuit of comfort”. I’d never heard that before, and it kind of blew my mind. Partly because I use most of my day-dreams to imagine being able to afford luxury goods - well, sort of: pickup trucks with the fancy trim levels or big houses on coveted locations. (I ski, so mostly ski-in-ski-out places).

But it makes sense - comfort is fairly stationary. Running a marathon isn’t comfortable. Stuffing myself with healthy food doesn’t give me the same comfortable/lazy feeling the way that overeating greasy, processed foods does. (Who feels like a nap after over-eating lettuce and other veggies?) And sleeping on the ground with a bike helmet as a pillow wasn’t nearly as difficult when I was in my 20s as it is now. I blame sleeping on a bed for the last decade. Too much comfort, maybe.

I remember my grandma saying that her fancy car was justified because her body needed the cushy seats. And I bet she did. I believe she would’ve been in more pain on a harder, bouncier seat. I don’t mean to argue that we shouldn’t be pursuing comfort. But considering how our pursuits might really be aging us is interesting. It’s something I consider often - if only because I have a nearly 40-bottle whisk(e)y collection. I love it. I’ll often just open the bottles to smell them. Being that it’s literal poison, and something that will age me in almost-real time, I half-heartedly try to maintain a two-drink-a-week max. Sometimes I’ll drift toward 4 or 6 in a week. But overall I’m drinking less than I ever have before. Pursuing comfort through substances ages us. And I’d argue I’m not pursuing comfort through whiskey. I’m way too passionate about it to reduce it to a buzz (and frankly, if I want a buzz, I can only drink beer; I don’t really get a buzz from drinking whiskey). But the point stands - people obviously pursue comfort from substances, whether that be food or heroin. I’m just aware of the pro’s and con’s of my whiskey collection.

But comfort is also a tool. It’s necessary in certain instances. First class seats on an airplane can be a necessary product for folks traveling for business. You can’t arrive exhausted if you have to pitch a million-dollar product a few hours after you land. I fly almost every week for work now. And many days after getting off a flight I need another 8 hours of sleep before I’m fully functional again. One idea of luxury - which is different from comfort, but keep following - is that it’s just the baseline of what certain people need in order to be comfortable enough to be fully functional. Of course, that’s a pretty high standard. And consuming luxury goods can give off the impression that we’re such high-functioning individuals that, we, too, are living such fast-paced lives that we need a lot in order to be fully functional. I think that conception easily blends into fashion and taste - we’re so developed and engaged with the fashion world, for example, that we can’t bear to wear clothes with inferior materials or stitching. It’s interesting, though, that in this understanding of luxury it doesn’t really have anything to do with pursuing comfort. Luxury, in this sense, is more about helping us to untertake other uncomfortable pursuits and continue to function at a high level. Sure, the leather might be soft and supple, but it’s more a reflection of the work that went into becoming the type of person who knows leather so well that anything less would be offensive. Or, more pragmatically, we realize that we'll need a first class seat because if we’re not well-rested when we land we’ll likely lose money and clout - we’ll undermine our overall pursuit - because of a bad showing/presentation.

Luxury in this sense is more like infrastructure. If you have a lot of kids, for example, a big house makes sense. This is where my day-dreams run into reality. I want a big house without the work it takes to fill it. I might throw parties in the big space, but how often would that really happen? And I currently have one child. So lately I’ve been leaning into this idea of not pursuing comfort too rigorously. Not trying to over-build my own infrastructure. Finding adequate tools for the jobs I want to pursue. Learning to invest well instead of over-spend on infrastructure I don’t need. I usually let the extra infrastructure go to waste anyway. But if I do the work, the research, on where to put my money - whether a specific product or an investment - that’s not usually a comfortable process. It’s research. It's a type of work. I often put off buying things for weeks or months because I don’t feel like researching them enough.

So what now, if I can’t day-dream about big and fancy houses and cars with fancy trim levels? I guess I’m left to focus on the work I’m supposed to be doing. It won’t stop me from aging, but I’m pretty sure it’ll help me to age more gracefully than if I were only pursuing comfort.