There is a useful test for the values of any era: look at what its rich people buy when they have run out of obvious things to buy. For most of the twentieth century, the answer was simple and additive. More square footage. More cars in the driveway. A second home, then a third, each requiring its own small staff to keep the dust off the surfaces nobody touched. Luxury was a verb that meant accumulate.
Look now. The genuinely wealthy are buying space in a different sense — not floor area, but emptiness. The vast minimal apartment with almost nothing in it. The week of silence at a price that would furnish a flat. The calendar with a free afternoon defended like a border. The most expensive thing money can now buy is the absence of things, and the absence of demands, and the absence of the relentless low hum of being available.
From scarcity to surfeit
This inversion has a logic. Luxury has always been, at bottom, the conspicuous possession of whatever is scarce. When food was scarce, luxury was fat. When fabric was scarce, luxury was the absurd extra yardage of a train dragged across a ballroom floor. When information was scarce, luxury was the library, the private tutor, the subscription to the journal nobody else received.
But we now live in the first era of genuine surfeit. Calories are cheap and everywhere; thinness, not fatness, is the luxury body. Goods are cheap and everywhere; the empty room, not the full one, is the luxury interior. Information is free and infinite and arrives whether you asked for it or not — and so the luxury is the quiet, the off-switch, the right to not know what is happening for a few hours and to suffer no penalty for it.
We spent the twentieth century escaping scarcity. We will spend the twenty-first trying to recover it on purpose.
The diet, the decluttered home, the dopamine fast, the silent retreat — strip away the wellness vocabulary and they are all the same gesture. They are the rich, and the aspirational, manufacturing artificial scarcity because the natural kind has vanished and they have discovered, to their genuine surprise, that they preferred it.
The democratic version
It would be easy to read all this as one more thing the wealthy get and the rest of us watch through glass. And the worst version of it certainly is that: "space" sold back to us at a markup, mindfulness with a membership fee. But the underlying good — emptiness, silence, the unscheduled hour — is one of the few luxuries that does not actually require money. It requires only the much harder thing, which is permission. Permission to leave the calendar blank. Permission to let the room stay bare. Permission to be, for a while, unreachable and unproductive and therefore, by the metrics of the age, briefly worthless.
A bare room and a blank afternoon cost nothing. What they cost is the courage to be seen doing nothing in a culture that has quietly decided nothing is the one thing a person must never be caught doing.
The luxury, in the end, is not the empty room. The empty room is only the evidence. The luxury is the inner state the empty room makes possible — the rare condition of having enough, of wanting nothing more for the moment, of standing in a space that asks nothing of you. That used to be called contentment. We will probably end up paying a great deal to rediscover it, when it was free the whole time, waiting in every afternoon we filled.