If you’ve never had a reason to read about Thorstein Veblen and his critique of Americans in the Guilded Age of the early 20th century, he is worth knowing about. He wrote an insightful study about wealth in America called The Theory of the Leisure Class that explained how and wealth in America is tied to social status. He introduced the idea of “conspicuous consumption” by which wealthy people display their wealth visibly by spending money in public ways beyond need. Basically, the idea is that the leisure class are those who have excess. They have more than they need. And, often, what they do is demonstrate this excess to the world in all kinds of ways. Flashy things like clothes and jewlery. But also more subtle things like being at rest in public.

Why this matters is how it affects those who are not wealthy, those who do not have excess. For these people, their consumption is necessary, measured, and often not public. When you don’t have the ability to consume in this way, leisure may not even occur to you. And not being able to enjoy time, to do something more than rest for the sake of more work, it makes it impossible to imagine delighting in anything.

You can see a little bit about Veblen’s ideas here:

This discussion reminded me of how the act of delighting, of enjoying, of observing something beautiful or doing something meaningful––these practices are rebellious and revolutionary. Helping someone else take moments to delight is even more powerful. Experiencing our lives and our bodies as things that are delightful and that enjoy reveling in delight is a powerful retort to conspicuous consumption.

This kind of resistance reminds me of those healing words Mary Oliver wrote:

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

June is a season that is particularly bright in its distance from the birth of Spring and the dwindling of Fall. It is a season for delighting in ourselves and our world. And for this month, perhaps it is good to remind the world that our delight is as it ought to be, a natural part of our lives, no matter our wealth or status.

Sometimes it is hard to tap into our spiritual selves or find time to nurture our creativity and intellectual curiosity. Here is a section that reflects on some nourishing materials from around the web and related media channels in order to get us thinking, get us feeling, and get us reflecting on the lives we are living in this big world. **Some Adult/Mature Themes May Appear in Links and Other Attached Material**

–––––––––––––––

Allan T. Georgia, MDiv, MTS, PhD

Share this post: