Consider the following comments on luxury.
The first time I bought something I did not need, I discovered how quickly need can be invented.
Yesterday's luxury has a habit of becoming today's bare necessity.
Luxury is the art of needing what nobody needed a generation ago.
We do not enjoy the luxury so much as the proof that we can afford it.
There is a comfort that softens a life and a comfort that quietly closes it in.
Write a reflective piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your thinking and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
A reflective thesis is that luxury revealed more about my wanting than about the things themselves, since the pleasure faded fast while the appetite it woke did not. Open with a specific scene, a first taste of something indulgent, the particular feeling of an object I had longed for finally in my hands. Then work the tension between luxury as genuine delight, the real warmth of comfort, beauty and ease, and luxury as a moving line, where each indulgence quietly resets what I now consider ordinary. A useful structural move contrasts the luxuries that enriched my life with the ones I pursued mainly so that others would see me having them. Caution: resist the easy lesson that I should simply renounce comfort, since pretending to despise pleasure is its own kind of vanity, and the harder honesty is admitting which comforts I actually need.