Daniel sent us this one — he and Hannah were apartment hunting in Jerusalem, saw a place billed as "luxury," and it was nice but also a bit dilapidated. And that got him thinking about how "luxury" might be one of those words that's doing a lot of work while meaning almost nothing. His actual question is: what does luxury even mean? What are luxury goods by definition? Is the whole concept meaningless, and does everyone just carry around their own private version of it?
This is one of those words that economists have been fighting about for, I want to say, a hundred and thirty years, and they still haven't settled it. The moment you try to pin luxury down, it squirms away.
Like adopting a feral cat.
And the apartment example is perfect because it exposes the crack right at the foundation. One person walks into a "luxury" apartment and sees the marble countertops. Another person walks in and notices the water damage in the corner. Both are looking at the same physical space, but only one of them is having a luxury experience. So where does the luxury live — in the countertop or in the person?
That's the thing. Daniel mentioned he hates the deferential butler experience — the social subordination makes him uncomfortable. Meanwhile, for someone else, that's the entire point. The subordination IS the luxury. And I think that's worth sitting with for a second, because it reveals something really strange. Two people can have completely opposite reactions to the same stimulus, and both can legitimately call their reaction "the luxury experience" — or the failure of it. So right out of the gate, we've got a concept that seems to contain its own negation.
Right, and that's not just a personal quirk — that's a genuine philosophical split. There's a whole literature on this. Thorstein Veblen, eighteen ninety-nine, "The Theory of the Leisure Class." He basically invented the concept of conspicuous consumption. For Veblen, a luxury good isn't defined by its materials or craftsmanship — it's defined by its ability to signal status. The more useless and expensive, the better it signals. A gold-plated stapler.
Status signalling through office supplies. We've peaked as a species.
Here's the twist — Veblen goods, as economists now call them, actually violate the normal law of demand. Usually, when price goes up, demand goes down. With Veblen goods, when price goes up, demand goes UP. Because the high price is the feature. Nobody buys a Rolex because it tells time better than a ten-dollar Casio. The Casio is more accurate.
The luxury IS the inefficiency.
The luxury is the inefficiency. That's one definition. And it's actually measurable — economists have identified Veblen effects in everything from handbags to wine to university tuition. There was a fascinating study out of Stanford a few years back where they showed people the same wine but told them it cost different amounts. Not only did people say the "expensive" wine tasted better, their brains actually showed more activity in the pleasure centers. The belief created the experience.
We're not just talking about social performance. We're talking about neurology.
We're talking about neurology. The luxury experience is partly manufactured by your own expectations. Which means two people drinking the same wine, in the same room, at the same moment, are having genuinely different experiences based entirely on what they believe they're consuming.
Which would mean luxury isn't a property of objects at all. It's a property of brains. But wait — if I'm hearing you right, this also means there's a kind of placebo effect baked into every luxury transaction. And that raises a really uncomfortable question. If the pleasure is real, but it's triggered by a false belief — like the price of the wine — is the pleasure itself fake? Or is it real pleasure built on a false foundation?
That's the dilemma. And I think the answer is unsettling. The pleasure is real. The brain activity is real. The experience is real. The fact that the causal chain runs through a misconception doesn't make the endpoint fake — it makes the whole process weirdly indirect. It's like taking a scenic route that only exists because you misread the map. You still saw the scenery.
Then you can't trust your own enjoyment. You can't know whether you're enjoying something because it's enjoyable, or because someone told you it was expensive.
We can't fully trust our own enjoyment, no. But we've always known this. That's what advertising is. That's what branding is. The entire consumer economy is built on the insight that what people buy is not the thing but the meaning of the thing. Luxury is just the most concentrated form of that dynamic.
We do have luxury taxes. We have luxury goods classifications. The European Union has an actual legal definition — they classify luxury goods based on price point, materials, and brand positioning. France literally has a government committee, the Comité Colbert, that decides which brands count as luxury.
A government committee deciding what's fancy. That's the most French thing I've ever heard.
It really is. But it points to something real — luxury isn't entirely subjective either. Nobody looks at a cardboard box and says "ah yes, luxury living." There are thresholds. There are materials and craft traditions that cluster together. The question is whether those clusters have any necessary connection to the experience, or whether they're just cultural conventions we've agreed on.
The Comité Colbert is actually a perfect case study here. They were founded in nineteen fifty-four, they represent about ninety French luxury houses, and their whole mission is to preserve what they call "French art de vivre." But if you look at who they've admitted over the decades, you can see the definition shifting in real time. They started with crystal makers and leatherworkers. Now they've got luxury hotels, they've got high-end patisseries. The boundaries keep expanding because the concept keeps expanding.
Even the official gatekeepers can't hold the line. The definition drifts.
The definition drifts because the culture drifts. What felt luxurious in nineteen fifty-four — hand-stitched gloves, bespoke luggage — overlaps only partially with what feels luxurious today. And that's within one country. Cross borders and it gets even messier.
This is where the apartment comes back in. Daniel said the place was nice but a bit dilapidated. So someone — a developer, a landlord — decided to call it luxury. And presumably they're not lying, exactly. They're making a claim. But what's the claim?
In the Israeli real estate market, the claim is almost entirely about location and square footage. I've looked at the listings. "Luxury" in Jerusalem real estate means, practically speaking: central neighborhood, over a hundred square meters, parking spot, maybe a view. The actual build quality is all over the place.
"luxury" in that context is a real estate agent's euphemism for "expensive.
This is where it gets interesting, because the word is doing two contradictory things at once. On one hand, it's a marketing signal — it's supposed to convey something about quality. On the other hand, it's a price signal — it's telling you what to expect to pay. And the relationship between those two things is often completely decoupled.
You're paying for the word. But here's what I want to know — is that actually a scam, or is it just how language works? Like, if I call my sandwich "artisanal," and you pay an extra three dollars, and the sandwich is fine but not transcendent, did I lie to you? Or did I just use a word that means "please pay three dollars more"?
I think it depends on whether the word carries an implicit warranty. "Artisanal" implies something about production method — small batch, handmade, whatever. If your sandwich was made in a factory and you just put it on a wooden board, that's arguably fraud. "Luxury" is trickier because it doesn't imply any specific production method. It implies an experience. And experiences are harder to litigate.
You're paying for the word.
You're paying for the word. And the word then shapes your experience of the thing. There's a feedback loop. You pay more, so you expect more, so you perceive more — up to a point. Until the dilapidation breaks through.
Does the luxury collapse retroactively?
That's the question. There's some really interesting work in consumer psychology on this. When people pay for a luxury experience and it fails, they often report feeling not just disappointed but betrayed. It's not "this product was bad" — it's "I was lied to." Because luxury isn't just a claim about the object, it's a promise about how the object will make you feel. And when the feeling doesn't arrive, the entire transaction feels fraudulent.
Luxury is a promise. That's one definition. But promises can be broken. Which means luxury is always at risk of not being luxury anymore. It's inherently unstable. You can lose luxury status. And that's weird, right? Most product categories don't work that way. A chair doesn't stop being a chair if you have a bad day. But luxury seems to depend on a kind of ongoing performance.
That's what makes it different from, say, "expensive." Expensive is a fact. Luxury is a narrative. And narratives can collapse. There are brands that used to be luxury and aren't anymore — Pierre Cardin is the classic example. In the sixties and seventies, Pierre Cardin was high fashion. Then they licensed the name out to everything — luggage, pens, cigarette lighters — and the narrative collapsed. The products didn't necessarily get worse. The story just stopped working.
Let me push on this a bit. You said nobody looks at a cardboard box and calls it luxury. But I can imagine a five-hundred-dollar artisanal cardboard box, hand-stitched by monks in some remote monastery, made from heritage cardboard trees, and someone would absolutely call that luxury. Is that completely arbitrary?
No, because the monks are doing something specific. They're attaching a story — craft, rarity, tradition. Those are three of the core luxury signifiers. Bernard Arnault, who runs LVMH, has actually said this explicitly — he calls luxury "the expression of a culture." The product is almost secondary. What you're buying is the story about the product.
Luxury is storytelling.
Luxury is storytelling with a price tag. And the stories cluster around certain themes — heritage, rarity, craftsmanship, exclusivity. But here's the thing: those stories don't have to be true. They just have to be believed.
This is where I start getting uncomfortable. Because if luxury is just a story we tell ourselves, and the story can be entirely decoupled from material reality, then luxury is basically a collective hallucination. And yet people are spending real money — sometimes life-changing amounts of money — on this hallucination.
Is it a hallucination if the experience is real? Go back to the wine study. The brain activity was real. The pleasure was real. The fact that the pleasure was triggered by a false belief about price doesn't make the pleasure fake. It makes the causal chain weird, but the endpoint is genuine.
That's almost more disturbing. It means we can't trust our own enjoyment.
We can't fully trust our own enjoyment, no. But we've always known this. That's what advertising is. That's what branding is. The entire consumer economy is built on the insight that what people buy is not the thing but the meaning of the thing. Luxury is just the most concentrated form of that dynamic.
Okay, so let's try to actually answer the question. What are luxury goods by definition? You mentioned Veblen. You mentioned the EU classification. You mentioned storytelling. Is there an actual consensus definition, or is it just "we know it when we see it"?
There's no single consensus definition, but there are about four major frameworks that economists and marketers use. The first is the Veblen framework — luxury goods are goods where demand increases with price, because the price is the signal. The second is the income-elasticity framework — luxury goods are goods where consumption rises faster than income. If your income goes up ten percent and your spending on something goes up twenty percent, that's a luxury good. Basic food, by contrast, usually goes up less than income — you don't eat twice as many potatoes just because you got a raise.
Luxury is, mathematically, the stuff you disproportionately buy more of when you have more money. Which means we could actually identify luxury goods by looking at spending patterns across income levels. Has anyone done that?
There are whole national surveys that track this. And the results are sometimes surprising. Restaurant meals are highly income-elastic — they're a luxury by this definition. But so is higher education. So is healthcare in many countries. The framework doesn't distinguish between "luxury" in the champagne-and-yachts sense and "luxury" in the sense of things people want more of when they can afford them.
Which already tells us the framework is capturing something broader than what we normally mean by luxury.
The third framework is the experiential framework — luxury goods are goods that provide an experience beyond their functional utility. This is where the butler comes in. The butler doesn't actually do anything you couldn't do yourself. The function is trivial. The experience is everything.
The fourth is the positional framework. Luxury goods are goods that signal your position in a social hierarchy. This is related to Veblen but more specific — it's not just about showing wealth, it's about showing membership in a particular class. The right watch, the right school, the right vocabulary. Luxury as shibboleth.
Four frameworks — price signalling, income elasticity, experience beyond function, and social positioning. And none of them fully capture it alone.
None of them fully capture it alone. And they sometimes contradict each other. A luxury good under the income-elasticity framework might not be a luxury good under the experiential framework. A bigger house consumes more of your income as your income rises, but the experience of a bigger house isn't necessarily luxurious — it might just be more space to heat and clean.
The frameworks are describing different phenomena that happen to share a word.
And that's why the question "is luxury meaningless" is so sharp. It's not meaningless — it's overdetermined. It means too many things at once, and those meanings pull in different directions.
This reminds me of something. You know how in Jerusalem, there's this whole phenomenon of "luxury" apartment towers going up — forty stories, glass facades, the whole thing — and then they sit half empty?
The ghost towers. Yeah, that's a real and documented phenomenon. A lot of those apartments are purchased by foreign investors as store-of-value assets. They're not lived in. They're not even rented out. They're just... Like gold bars with plumbing.
What's the luxury there? Nobody's experiencing anything. The apartments are empty. The marble countertops have never had a coffee cup placed on them. The views have never been looked at. It's luxury as pure potential, never actualized.
The luxury is pure financial abstraction. It's luxury as asset class. And that's a fifth framework, honestly — luxury as store of value. A Birkin bag appreciates. A Patek Philippe appreciates. Certain luxury goods function almost like currency, and the fact that they're luxury goods is what gives them that function. But it's completely decoupled from any human experience of the object.
You can have luxury without anyone actually experiencing luxury.
You can have luxury without a single human being ever setting foot in the apartment. The luxury exists in the deed, not in the dwelling.
That feels like the endpoint of something. The final stage of a process where luxury detaches entirely from life and becomes pure abstraction.
Yet, simultaneously, you have people like Daniel who are actually trying to live in these places. Who walk into an apartment billed as luxury and have a real, embodied experience of it. And that experience might be "this is a bit dilapidated." The abstraction and the reality coexist, and they're constantly colliding.
Let's talk about the personal definition piece. Daniel's prompt basically asks — does everyone carry their own definition of luxury? And based on everything we've just said, the answer seems to be yes, but not in a free-for-all way. It's more that everyone assembles their definition from the available cultural materials.
That's well put. Personal definitions of luxury aren't invented from scratch. They're curated from a cultural menu. And different people curate differently. Daniel curates out the butler and curates in the seamless check-in. Someone else does the opposite. But both of them are drawing from the same pool of luxury signifiers — service, ease, exclusivity, whatever. They're just weighting them differently.
"personal luxury" is a remix, not an original composition.
A remix, yeah. And the DJ is your own psychology, your own history, your own anxieties. If you grew up with servants and felt uncomfortable about it, you might curate out the butler. If you grew up without servants and always dreamed of them, you might curate the butler in. Same cultural material, different personal weighting.
This is where I think the conversation gets useful. Because if luxury is partly a personal remix, then the smart move is to actually figure out what YOUR remix is. Instead of just accepting whatever the market tells you is luxurious.
This is exactly what the behavioral economists are saying now. There's a concept called "mindful consumption" — the idea that you should periodically audit what actually brings you satisfaction, rather than what's supposed to bring you satisfaction. And the results are often surprising. People discover that the expensive thing they thought they wanted does nothing for them, and the cheap thing they took for granted is actually central to their wellbeing.
I love that. And it makes me think — there's probably a whole category of things that people THINK are luxury but that actually make them miserable. The fancy restaurant where you feel judged by the waitstaff. The high-end hotel where you're stressed about breaking something. The designer clothes you're afraid to actually wear.
And that's the dark side of luxury as social performance. If luxury is about signalling, then the signal can become a burden. You're not enjoying the thing — you're performing enjoyment of the thing. And performance is work.
The question "what does luxury mean to you" isn't just a philosophical exercise. It's a practical tool for not wasting your money.
For not wasting your life, honestly. Because the pursuit of someone else's luxury is a recipe for permanent dissatisfaction. You're chasing a feeling that was calibrated for someone else's nervous system.
There's something almost political here, and I want to name it carefully. The luxury industry — and it is an industry, hundreds of billions of dollars — has a vested interest in making sure you DON'T figure out your own remix. Because if you did, you might discover that your version of luxury costs a fraction of what they're selling.
The entire marketing apparatus is designed to convince you that luxury is objective. That there's a hierarchy. That this watch is objectively superior to that watch. That this hotel is objectively more luxurious than that hotel. Because once you believe luxury is objective, you'll pay for the ranking. You'll pay for the stars. You'll pay for the word.
The stars might have nothing to do with what you actually value.
The stars measure what the star-givers value. Which might overlap with what you value, or might not. And the star-givers have their own incentives. Hotel star ratings, for example, are partly about objective things like "does the hotel have a twenty-four-hour front desk" and partly about subjective things like "quality of service." But even the objective criteria encode assumptions about what luxury means. A twenty-four-hour front desk assumes you want human interaction at any hour. What if your version of luxury is never having to speak to a human being?
The fully automated hotel. No staff, just an app and a keypad. For some people, that's dystopian. For others, it's paradise.
Neither is wrong. They just have different remixes.
Let me push on the other direction though. Is there a limit to this? Are there things that are objectively luxurious regardless of personal remix? Health, for instance. If you have excellent health, is that a luxury?
That's a fascinating edge case. Health isn't usually classified as a luxury good because it's not a purchased good in the traditional sense. But there's definitely a luxury dimension to health. Access to the best doctors, the best treatments, the best preventative care — that's absolutely a luxury market. And yet, basic health feels different. Nobody says "ah yes, my functioning liver, such luxury.
Speak for yourself. I'm very attached to my liver.
The point stands. There are things that feel like they exist outside the luxury framework — love, meaning, purpose, health, safety. And yet all of them have luxury markets attached to them. You can buy a luxury wellness retreat. You can buy a luxury matchmaking service. You can buy a luxury security detail.
Luxury colonizes everything eventually.
Luxury is a colonizing concept. It attaches itself to any domain where people have more money than they strictly need, and it reframes that domain in terms of hierarchy and exclusivity. Even domains that originally had nothing to do with status.
Water is the classic example. Water is the most basic necessity. And now there's luxury water. There's water sommeliers.
There's a water sommelier at the Ritz-Carlton in Los Angeles. Actual job title. They'll pair water with your meal.
Of course there are. And I'm sure the water is excellent. But at some point you have to ask — is this actually about the water, or is this about being the kind of person who has a water pairing?
It's about being the kind of person who has a water pairing. The water itself is almost incidental. And that's Veblen again — the uselessness is the point. Water is free. Paying for water pairing is the most efficient possible way to signal that you have money to burn.
We've got luxury as signal, luxury as experience, luxury as asset, luxury as story, luxury as remix. Is there a way to tie this together? A unified theory of luxury?
I'm not sure there is a unified theory, and I think the attempt to unify might actually be the mistake. Maybe luxury is plural. Maybe it's a family of related phenomena that don't reduce to a single essence.
A family resemblance, in the Wittgenstein sense.
Wittgenstein's idea that some concepts don't have a single defining feature — they have overlapping similarities, like family members who all share different combinations of features. Luxury might be like that. Some luxury goods are about status, some are about experience, some are about investment, some are about craft. They don't all share one thing. But they cluster.
The clustering is real enough that the word isn't meaningless. It's just fuzzy at the edges.
It's fuzzy at the edges, and the fuzziness is where all the interesting problems live. The dilapidated apartment billed as luxury — that's a fuzzy-edge problem. It has some luxury features, lacks others, and the question of whether it "counts" is undecidable.
The answer to "is luxury meaningless" is no. But the answer to "what does luxury mean" is "it depends who's asking, when, and why.
That's not a cop-out. That's actually a precise description of how the concept functions in the world. It's context-dependent, person-dependent, and purpose-dependent.
Which brings us back to Daniel's original experience. He walks into this apartment. It says "luxury" on the listing. He has a reaction. And his reaction is basically — this word is doing a lot of work, and I'm not sure it's earning its keep.
I think that's the healthiest possible response. The word "luxury" in a real estate listing is a prompt. It's saying: imagine this space as your best possible living situation. And then you walk in, and you compare the prompt to the reality. Sometimes the reality delivers. Sometimes it doesn't. But the word itself is just the opening bid in a negotiation between the seller's story and your own experience.
The takeaway is: when someone says "luxury," your job is to ask "by whose definition?
The follow-up is: "and do I share that definition?" Because if you don't, you're about to pay a premium for someone else's taste.
Which is a very expensive way to be disappointed.
It's the most expensive way to be disappointed.
You know, this whole conversation reminds me — there's a related dynamic in how we think about privacy and exclusivity. The VIP terminal experience, the private check-in, the separate entrance. For some people, that separation IS the luxury. For others, it's alienating. And I've actually experienced both sides of this. I was once upgraded to a first-class lounge at an airport, and I found it deeply uncomfortable. Everyone was very quiet and very serious, and I felt like I was in a library where I wasn't allowed to laugh. Meanwhile, the regular terminal had a bar where people were actually enjoying themselves.
Right — the "seceding from the public" thing. The walled garden as luxury product. And again, it's completely dependent on whether you experience the public as a burden or as a feature. Some people want to be in the middle of everything. The noise is the point. The crowd is the amenity.
The luxury industry will sell you both. It will sell you the private island and the bustling city-center penthouse. The only constant is the price tag.
The only constant is the price tag. Which is maybe the real definition of luxury, in the end — luxury is whatever costs more than the functional equivalent. The rest is commentary.
That's almost a definition. Luxury is the surcharge for meaning.
Luxury is the surcharge for meaning. I like that. The product does X. The luxury version does X plus a story. And you pay for the story.
Whether the story is worth the surcharge — that's the only question that matters.
The answer is going to be different for every person, every product, every moment. Which is why this conversation never really ends. Every generation rediscovers that luxury is slippery, and every generation has to figure out their own remix.
We haven't solved luxury. But we've mapped the problem space. Four economic frameworks — actually five, if we count the store-of-value one. The collapse of the signifier. The ghost towers. The water sommelier.
The water sommelier is going to haunt me.
As he should.
You know what I keep coming back to? There's a line from a designer — I think it was Coco Chanel, though I'm not certain — "luxury is a necessity that begins where necessity ends." The idea being that luxury isn't the opposite of necessity. It's what you want after your necessities are met. It's the shape of your desire once you're no longer constrained by survival.
Luxury is a window into what people actually want. It's almost diagnostic. If you want to know what someone values, ignore what they say and look at what they spend their surplus on.
If you want to understand a person — or a culture — look at what they call luxury. Because that's what they desire when they're free to desire anything.
Which means Daniel's discomfort with the butler isn't just a quirk. It's a statement about what he values. Autonomy over service. Equality over hierarchy. Seamlessness over performance.
The person who loves the butler is making a different statement. They value recognition. They value being cared for. They value visible status. Neither is wrong. But they're different anthropologies.
Luxury is basically applied anthropology.
Luxury is applied anthropology with a markup.
There it is. The episode in eight words.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: Naked mole rats can vocalize through their teeth in a way that produces a sound with almost no reverberation — an acoustic property that, if you were measuring it in the Gilbert Islands in nineteen twelve, would have been completely inaudible to the local wildlife.
...right. I'm going to need you to walk me through the chain of associations that led to that one, but I'm also afraid to ask.
What do we leave listeners with? I think it's this: the next time someone tries to sell you something by calling it luxury, don't ask "is it worth it." Ask "luxury by whose definition, and do I share it." That question alone will save you a lot of money and a lot of disappointment.
If you're in Jerusalem apartment hunting, maybe add a follow-up: "and when was the plumbing last replaced.
Words to live by.
This has been My Weird Prompts, with me, Herman Poppleberry.
Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop for keeping this ship afloat — and for reminding us that naked mole rats have more acoustic sophistication than most luxury apartments.
If you enjoyed this, rate and review us wherever you listen — it helps. Find more at myweirdprompts dot com.
Until next time.
