The duty of delight

Self-denial, the needs of others, and the erotic

I met someone last month who asked if it was OK to turn off the news about Gaza, Ukraine, Armenia etc. or did we have a duty to say informed, and concerned to the tragedies of the world? I was reminded of Dorothy Day’s belief that we have a “duty of delight.”¹ She got the phrase from the 19th century English art critic John Ruskin:

It is not possible for [someone] to walk across so much as a rood of the natural earth, with mind unagitated and rightly poised, without receiving strength and hope from some stone, flower, leaf, or sound, nor without a sense of a dew falling upon him out of the sky. … [I[n much of the doing and teaching even of holy men, who in the recommending of the love of God to us, refer but seldom to those things in which it is most abundantly and immediately shown; though they insist much on his giving of bread, and raiment, and health… they tell us often to meditate in the closet… they dwell on the duty of self-denial, but they exhibit not the duty of delight. — John Ruskin, The True and the Beautiful.

I think there’s a tendency for people, when they get serious about spirituality, [in deep voice] to get serious. And that’s certainly part of it. There is grief in this world. There is no end to the painful images and realities that the world offers up to us. If we are awake and open-hearted to the world, we feel pain. The people closest to us, the ones we love, suffer the three pains of Buddha: old age, sickness, and death. If we open ourselves up to love others, we feel pain. We ourselves hurt from real disappointment, loss, and regret. If we wake up to our inner lives, we feel pain.

And we want it not to be. Life is suffering [a guy named Buddha].

And yet there is a duty of delight. We must risk delight.

It’s good and right to feel pleasure

In Financial Freedom 2, we talk about a key concept in Hinduism, called Purusartha, the four proper goals of human life. The four puruṣārthas are:

• Dharma (righteousness, virtue, destiny),

• Artha (economic prosperity, financial security, career),

• Kama (sensual enjoyment, emotional desire, and aesthetic pleasure), and

• Moksha (liberation, annihilation, nirvana).

All four Purusharthas are important, but in cases of conflict, Hindu philosophy generally considers dharma more important than artha or kama.

But important to note: artha, the pursuit of wealth, financial security and economic prosperity, is a valid and important spiritual pursuit of human life. Not because it allows you to pursue your dharma, but as an end to itself. I see this as a sticking point in a lot of liberal/progressive Americans who, maybe because their money scripts, avoid financial security and wealth-building as being “greedy” or “selfish.”

But being without enough is not virtue. Unless you’re taking a spiritual path most Americans are unwilling to pursue.

And kama is too. Kama is one of the four valid spiritual pursuits! A tough lesson for me, one that I’m only slowly beginning to learn. Despite the grief and terror of this world, we must pursue pleasure. We must risk delight.

Extravagance as spiritual value

My friend Diania Merriam runs the Econome conference, a gathering of FIRE folks. She knows all about voluntary simplicity and financial liberation. And lives it. She was telling me this week about shopping for a wedding dress:

This is Diania writing about the experience:

My entire life, my mom has told me that she’s really looking forward to going wedding dress shopping with me. Her mom passed away before she got the chance to have that experience when she married my dad. It was really painful for my mom to find a wedding dress without her mom there. And she felt very strongly that she wanted to have this experience with me.

No pressure, right?!?!?

My mom flew in from NJ in August and we spent all day dress shopping. It was awful. I hated everything, and frankly, I really didn’t care about a wedding dress. From my perspective, it’s just a dress and there were so many other aspects about getting married and the wedding that I thought were more important. I wanted to find a cheap dress that was “sufficient” and call it a day. But I couldn’t even find that.

Upon further reflection, I had a change of heart and decided to honor this experience for my mom. She flew in again this week for round 2 of dress shopping. We went to Boca the night before and had the most expensive dinner of our lives. We got dressed up for dress shopping and treated it like a really special occasion.

And then it was.

…

[Margo, the wedding dress consultant] didn’t make me go through racks with her. She got me in a fitting room, put a dress on me… and I was in shock. I didn’t know it was possible to love a dress this much. The first thing I said was, “my mom is going to freak the fuck out”.

And then she did.

We laughed, we cried, and we celebrated. It was the “find the dress” moment my mom dreamed about my whole life. What a redemption from our first attempt in August. The first dress Margo put me in was “the one”.

I didn’t think I cared about a wedding dress because I’ve always prided myself on not being materialistic. But I will never forget this experience and I will be forever grateful to Margo for creating this special day for me and my mom.

Diania, another frugal FIRE person, is going to spend twice, or maybe three times as much as she planned for on a wedding dress. And she looks amazing in it! [I would put a photo of her here, but she doesn’t want her husband Brad to see it before the wedding. She wants give him the privilege of being shocked by her beauty. And he will.] As she goes through this, Diania is going way over her budget plan on her wedding. But as Don Draper said, “THAT’S WHAT THE MONEY IS FOR.” Sometimes you have to spend the money for joy. Kama is a valid spiritual pursuit.

We must risk delight. Otherwise, this life, with all its troubles isn’t worth it.

Breaking the jar

Diania’s tale reminds me of New Testament story of Mary breaking a jar of a very expensive perfume and washing Jesus’s feet with her hair as an act of devotion. Expensive perfume, like a year’s worth of salary. The “right-headed,” “good” disciples complain that the perfume could have been sold and the money given to the poor and Jesus challenges them, saying:

“Do you see this woman? I came into your house. You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet. Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—as her great love has shown. But whoever has been forgiven little loves little.”

Sometimes the bean counters don’t understand heaven. We don’t need to do the “right” things; we need to do the loving things. We need to delight the world back to its senses.

Fighting self-denial

My friend Michael Poffenberger told me that Jesus story, to challenge me and my frugality. I’m not a generous person generally. Not even (especially?) with myself. I’m generally a believer of Peter Singer’s effective altruism, Jesus’s disciples side of the story. To sum up the moral dilemmas that effective altruism brings up: if $200 could save a child’s life (and it can), do you have any moral justification to spend $200 on some bullshit pleasure expense on yourself?² Once I have provided for my own needs, I’d rather give my money to people who need it more. Is it really my money? If I removed the personal possessive pronoun “my”, so core to capitalism and Western individualism, where would the money go: go saving someone’s life, or to buying myself and a friend an expensive dinner?³

Or at what point is frugality self-denial? Maybe after hitting FIRE, I have to learn to be on the back side of frugal and occasionally be extravagant. I’ve already learned and practiced the rules, now I have to learn the right way to break them. It doesn’t work to be extravagant if you never learned to be frugal, but to stay frugal when it no longer is necessary is to miss the point too.⁴ You can’t bean counter your way to heaven.

So I’m learning to be more generous, with myself and others. Accept kama. It’s hard with the self-denial and scarcity mentality of my immigrant family fleeing the Communists. My family lost everything. Pleasure is not ingrained in my family. But that is the growth I need.

In the dark cave you fear lies the prize you seek.

Being alive to the erotic

Are you taking life too seriously? With all the stresses of the world, have you lost joy? Did you know there’s an election coming this year? The great Jewish philosopher and mystic Martin Buber wrote, “Play is the exultation of the possible.” Therapist Esther Perel talks about being the child of two Holocaust survivors and seeing the difference between people who survived and people who actually lived was a sense of hope, possibility, and freedom:

My parents Sala Ferlegier and Icek Perel were survivors of the Nazi concentration camps and sole survivors of their respective families….They came out of that experience wanting to charge at life with a vengeance and to make the most of each day. They both felt that they had been granted a unique gift: living life again. My parents didn’t just want to survive, they wanted to revive. They wanted to embrace vibrancy and vitality — in the mystical sense of the word, the erotic. I owe them much of my perspective on life, as well as my belief in the power of will, the search for meaning, and the resilience of the human spirit. To me, there is a world of difference between “not being dead” and “being alive”. I owe this understanding to my parents.

So buy that expensive wedding dress. Sometimes you have to spend the money for joy. Kama is a valid spiritual pursuit, even if, and maybe because of the world’s problems. Rabbi Tarfon, a second-century Jewish sage wrote: “Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief... You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.” Yes, Gaza, Ukraine, Armenia, the presidential elections, other people in poverty, struggling to make ends meet. If we are awake, we will feel this pain.

But we still have a duty of delight. Honestly, I don’t know how to square this. But it is true. To not delight in this world is to praise the Devil.

We have a duty to shock our husband with our beauty on our wedding day. A duty to break the jar and pour out the very expensive contents over the one we love. A duty to break the budget,⁵ claim the erotic, and do something extravagant for ourselves.

If we don’t, we will have missed something very important.

A Brief for the Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

by Jack Gilbert

1. Mentioned briefly in my 2023 year-end audit.

2. Peter Singer’s Solution to World Poverty is really worth the read. The poverty of the world could be solved by the middle class, i.e. you and me. Easily.

3. Effective altruism and FIRE probably work for Type 5s on the Enneagram. For the thinkers out there. As my friend Doug Lynam puts it, for people who can just hear a principle, and just live it.

4. Another factor: a big part of my anti-consumerism is environmental stewardship. It’s not my earth to destroy. 50% of our carbon footprint are the goods and services we buy. I’ve written a lot about this before. But put that aside for now.

5. Once you’ve learned the rules ;)