Top Tens: The Most Useless Luxuries
A lot of life is not about the thing itself, but about the promise of the thing: you still get up on Saturday morning at a reasonable time, but you have the pleasure of going to bed on Friday night knowing you don’t have to. And that’s usually absolutely fine. But sometimes the promise is all there is, and we are sold something that we are told is luxury but which…isn’t. And sometimes the promise is so strongly attached to something that the (mis)perception survives years of real-life experience. Here, in no particular order, are 10 of the most useless, most overrated “luxuries”.
Feather Pillows
I hate feather pillows, and not just because I used to have immediate asthmatic problems when just in the same room. Because, while they’re marketed as "sleeping on a cloud," they’re a logistical disaster: whatever meagre packing they actually have has to be bundled up under your head for any kind of support; and even if you do manage to sleep on one, you’ll wake up an hour later with your head on the mattress, the tiny mouldering bundles of feathers having shuffled off sideways. Even at their best they are less comfortable than a regular old non-feather pillow. And I haven’t even mentioned the quills that poke you through the fabric. Granted, modern pillows use thicker, hypoallergenic materials, but that doesn’t make them any more comfortable; and is it really a luxury if you have to take action to prevent micro-stabbings and lung collapse?
Designer Logo Gear
Luxury used to be about craftsmanship; now, it’s more likely to be about being a walking advertisement. Except the corporates have pulled off a miraculous trick we never would have predicted. In normal circumstances, they would have to pay us to advertise. But when fashion comes into it, we pay them so that we can advertise on their behalf: €150 extra for a plain T-shirt that has an ugly 2-inch logo but is otherwise the same as these other plain T-shirts? Well, just take my money, everyone else will be so impressed, and I’ll feel good for helping those poor companies.
The Poshest Restaurants
Ah, look. I like my food, I like my fine dining; and I might even be keen to try all those 15 courses. But not all together. That’s just turning a nice night into an endurance test, not just for your knackered palate, but for your social battery: by course ten you’ve been stuck in the same chair for three hours, unable to hold a conversation because of all the constant toing and froing and fussing around your table. And staying with those high-end restaurants: adding gold flakes to food is the ultimate style-over-substance nonsense. Gold flake is tasteless, odourless, and has a texture like wet hankie. It’s only there so you can take a photo, as if anyone cares. While we’re at it, I remain to be convinced that anything assembled largely with tweezers has any place in a meal, or that it’s good service to have the wine bottle taken out of your hand when you go, perfectly happily, to pour it yourself. And – listen – put it all on a proper plate, would you?
Diamonds
Is the diamond industry the greatest heist in human history? Diamonds aren't rare, they’re relatively common rocks trapped in a De Beers basement somewhere just to manufacture scarcity. You’re paying half a year’s wage for a compressed pebble that loses half its value the second you leave the store. It’s an impressive rock, but it’s a rock (there are others far rarer and more beautiful); you can’t eat it, it produces no energy, it’s too volatile to be an investment, and most of us can’t actually tell a diamond from some cut glass. And "A Diamond is Forever" is just a successful 1940s ad slogan that still persuades us to buy some lumps of polished carbon.
Posh Fragrances
They’re made of the same ingredients as the “dupes” that replicate the scents at much lower costs, but brand perfumes can cost hundreds of euro for a bottle. And not only are most of those ingredients synthetic (nobody’s out there squeezing jasmine petals into a crystal jar under a moonlit waterfall), but the actual perfume, the liquid you think you’re buying, typically only makes up 2 – 3% of the total cost. The rest? For starters, about 40% on retail profit, and about 25% on marketing. Aside from anything else, that’s 25% on a kind of marketing that’s usually a pretentious stain on human culture: you know, some arty, crooked, black-and-white shots of Timothée Chalamet in an implausibly narrow corridor, whispering into a scarf something about time being a flat circle or the shape of liberty. Yeah, yeah, lads, just tell us what it smells like, and put a shirt on.
Bed Cushions
Specifically, those cushions arranged all over beds to make them look…cushiony. You do know you have to lift them all off to get in, then arrange them all again when you get up? It’s hard to say what has been achieved by all this, except to have a bedroom that vaguely matches something you saw in a magazine spread. In fact, this whole column could have been assembled out of useless things magazines sold us: tight pointy shoes, big glass box houses, everything-in-white interiors, things made of diamonds, designer watches and sunglasses…
Gold-Plated Cutlery
More useless opulence just for the sake of it. It doesn’t tarnish, I suppose, but you still have to wash the potato off it. But because it’s gold-plated you’re scared to put it in the dishwasher, or wash it too enthusiastically or in hot water. You’ve spent all that money on something that looks cheesier (not literally – you wouldn’t want it to get sticky) than stainless steel, and which makes spaghetti a financial gamble.
Private Airport Lounges
Yes, they’re quieter, which is nice, but the waiting-room décor is similar. But the offer made it seem like you were booking some kind of transcendental temporary existence. Some Bombay mix has been left out; no, you don’t know how long ago it was left out, but it’s in square bowls, which tells you this is luxury.
Infinity Pools
Pointless pools of smugness. Perhaps from a certain careful camera angle the water looks as if it’s just vanishing into the horizon, but in reality (and in the pool) it’s clearly spilling into a visible trough. You pay extra so you can be wet in exactly the same way, with the same little flecks of fluff and leaf and strangers’ secretions floating in it, but if you squint you can pretend to be a wealthy Bond villain. Perhaps afterwards you retire to a room with your own butler.
Hotel Rooms with Personal Butlers
Oh feck off. This is why society is finished – people so rich and so lazy that they won’t raid their own mini-bars; who pay vast sums of money just to have their privacy destroyed; who like to have their bedsheets turned down and have a stranger watching them while they watch the TV they can’t be bothered to personally turn on. The whole repellent idea of a personal butler was always beyond the pale, but a few years ago I saw a journalist discussing his experience with this exact setup (for one night, paid for by his editor): it was already bad enough with pointless social anxiety, but it became way too much when, stepping out of the shower in the morning, he was greeted by his butler offering him “your shorts, sir”. No. Just no. How may you feck off – let me count the ways.
