Personal luxury

Luxury is not about money. It is about living a truly authentic life. Luxury products were created to help people live a more comfortable life. Comfort is readily available to anyone not through buying more, but by just slowing down and enjoying the beauty that exists in a life simply lived.

• Luxury is not the opposite of poverty. It is the opposite of vulgarity.
• True luxury is about authenticity, and cannot be created by buying more. 
• Luxury is not a matter of having more or less. 
• Luxury is about creating an environment that liberates your aspirations.
• Luxury is about removing the distractions and living life the way you want to live.
• It is not living a spartan life or the life of an ascetic. It is not about reducing for the sake of reducing. 
• It is not about an idea of giving away everything you own in order to be happy.
• The journey of life is about discovering the right balance between work and play, people and things to help you create a life that is authentically yours.
• True luxury is not about being the first to have whatever the latest marketing campaign is pitching. True luxury is a very personal idea. 
• True luxury is about being able to liberate your aspirations in your own personal way. 
• True luxury is about creating the right balance in your life so that you have time for the things that matter most.
• Those watches, cars, jets and McMansions all cost time to amass them, but also the time it takes to maintain them and to dote over them. They demand your time as you cherish them and adore them.
• There is only so much time in the world. More cannot be created. It cannot be sold or traded. It can only be drawn upon, and the less you waste on the distractions of life, the more you have to spend creating a life that is truly yours and that is a true luxury.
• Regardless of how much money you have or how many baubles you might cherish, learn to simplify your life and you will learn the value of a minute.
• Invest your time not just in managing money and things but in relationships that supports, nurtures and helps you grow.
• In the end, success and affluence and luxury is not about showing off the latest gadget. It is not about having a bigger car or larger house. It is about being able to manage your time and your life, your way.

Take the time to evaluate what is important in your life and let that be the guideline, not just for happiness, but for living a rewarding, successful, and luxurious life.

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Don't handicap your children by making their lives easy ... Robert A. Heinlein

Luxury is the enemy of growth. Abundance is neither good nor healthy 
for the growth of a child’s mind ...  Abhijit Naskar

How much is enough?

• "How much is enough?" is a good question. Anyone involved in capitalism and markets will find this question uncomfortable. It is a qualitative question and is about how money makes us feel about spending, saving and giving and values we stand for.
• Enough is the quality of having everything you need and want but nothing in excess and nothing that burdens you. 
• Income to meet the expenses of frugal living, a home, a car, insurance for health & life, provision for children education and their well being, provision for health shocks, leisure, passions and retirement - is what is enough. 
• The best thing one can do to children is to give roots & wings. And the worst thing is to give them a mountain of wealth under which they will get buried never knowing what they are and what they wanted to be in life.
• Our culture is geared towards endless consumption and upgrades. Reasonable wealth is comfort. Meaningful testament to a life is well spent.
• While personal debt is bad, public debt is necessary not only for prosperity but to avoid economic disasters. A good economy must serve the needs of many instead of the few.
• A great economist told students that the capitalist system was capable of delivering such a sustained and steady increase in output that workers would eventually have all the material goods they could possibly want. They would need to toil for only 15 hours a week and could then spend the rest of the time enjoying themselves. Capitalism was a means, a rather distasteful means, to this end.
• Capitalist economies are efficient, but workers were unsatiated by any material possessions, and devote any of their time to their pleasures. The new servant class which emerged and served the needs of neo rich were paid little more than subsistence wages.
• Modern world is characterised by insatiability, an inability to say enough is enough, and the desire for more and more money. Economics, a narrowly focused discipline in which there is no distinction between wants and needs, has driven to the end of a cul-de-sac. 
• The short-term need to get the economy moving again should not deflect policy-makers from reforms that will lay the foundations of a saner, more stable world.
• Progress should be measured not by the traditional yardsticks of growth or per capita incomes but by the seven elements of the good life: health; security; respect; personality; harmony with nature; friendship; and leisure. 
• Job security is much weaker and the pressure on the environment has increased.
• There is more to life than gross domestic product. Growth at all costs has become enshrined as the goal of economic policy. We live in a country divided into workaholics who have more money than they know what to do with and millions of unemployed and under-employed citizens struggling to make ends meet on the proceeds of work in the informal economy.
• In the middle, there are the debt slaves worried about the mortgage and often one pay packet away from penury. We ought to be able to do better than this. They favour a society with liberalism, social democracy and the good society is within reach.

A little house well filled, little wife well willed and 
little land well tilled are the greatest riches ... Shakespeare 

Money has no utility to me beyond a certain point ... Bill Gates

The fortunate man is he who, born poor, or nobody, works gradually up to 
wealth and consideration, and, having got them, dies before he finds 
they were not worth so much trouble ... Charles Reade

Earnings beyond certain point usually result in gaudy life style - excessive spending, amassing wealth, paying excess amounts for services without much substance. These activities contributes to increase in consumption and wastage, emissions and abuse of nature. Every luxury looses its vigor after 20 uses. You begin to own many things and eventually things will own you. Display of wealth or possessions is not only vulgar but also reflects low self esteem, make others feel jealous, lose real friends and win false acquaintances. They become more and more insensitive and end up knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. 

Warren Buffet believes that setting up his heirs with a lifetime supply of food stamps just because they came out of the right womb can be harmful for them and is an antisocial act. The perfect amount to leave children is "enough money so that they would feel they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing." Bill and Melinda Gates are giving a $10 million only for each of their three children with a remark "It will mean they have to find their own way in life".