Back in the late '80s, early '90s, I recall walking into a strip mall retail store after dark. As I was stepping up to the curb, I took note of an illegally parked luxury sedan that had just been vacated by a middle-aged woman who was also walking inside. The car was parked in the fire zone, parallel to the row after row of stores. It was a huge sedan covered in glitzy chrome with two-tone paint (and probably a vinyl top).
But what also caught my eye was the fact that the halogen headlights were still on despite the fact that the car was now empty. Instinctively, I paused before calling out to the driver, who now was just 10 feet or so in front of me.
"Did you realize you left your headlights on?", I asked.
She replied with a wry smile. "They'll turn themselves off."
I was speechless.
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Luxury is defined by being pampered. Pampered is having someone or something proactively enact comfort / pleasure on your behalf. Novelty is often tied to this type of pleasure. Illusion and novelty go hand in hand.
Men know what they desire in luxury. The luxuries of this life / culture are elevated & celebrated, marketed & easily identifiable. So effectively in fact that their actual definition has become confused with their antecedent. That being needs.
Automobiles need switches to turn headlights on & off. It is a luxury to have that switch function automatically based on the degree of ambient light out of doors, but coming alongside this luxury is no doubt a loss of control or some level of disconnect between the driver and the automobile.
That disconnect, one can argue, frees up brain power / time for something else to focus on. Even if it's just a few seconds gained, it's still a gain. Plus, what if the driver were to forget to turn off their headlights after parking? Perhaps a dead battery would await them upon their return. But at the same time, what's actually lost when one turns control over to automated tech, and how much of that compromise is fueled by pursuing the status quo? In other words, are we actually relinquishing manual control whilst also embracing stupid (stupid is a verb)?
The Bible identifies man as not unlike sheep. Sheep are gifted in stupidity.
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Today, almost everyone is to some degree or another disconnected more and more from face to face relations, and this is especially the result of the epidemic that is social media. Social media is a luxury to the nth degree because it implies efficient technological connection when there's really none at all. It's like never actually reading the Bible but instead having someone provide you endless commentary on each of the 66 books sans any direct quotes. Depending on who the commentator(s) is, the level of entertainment can be fairly high, but again that harkens back to this being a luxury (novel) experience versus one that's hard-wired between two people.
I am so grateful to not have been reared during the rise of social media because I find that men who were have quite the difficult time seeing it for what it truly is.
Samson Society meets my need for face to face connection. At least once a week, I can look my brothers in the eye and talk. And there's no publicly traded company involved whatsoever. If you're also looking for that, come join us! Your experience there will leave you anything but speechless.
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