Spring Mountain Spring Moon
Over the last couple of days an e-mail exchange between two friends used, twice, the phrase living large. As sometimes happens, this time I looked at it and said, huh? What does that mean? So I looked it up in the urban dictionary and another online slang dictionary. Here’s what they had:
able to pay for and enjoying a very expensive style of living. Vacations in the hot spots, a huge apartment in the city, cars, servants – that’s my idea of living large!
phr. Doing okay. (The response to How ya living?) I’m living large. How you doing?
Living with an extravagant or self-indulgent lifestyle.
In a cascade came another phrase: How then, shall we live? then, Peter Singer’s new book: Doing the Most Good. Then, what? And, living well is the best revenge.
I’ve always been struck by the power of unspoken, perhaps even unknown motivators, things that might have entered our psychic world unnoticed, sort of sliding in under our usual filters. My suspicion is that living large is such an unspoken, often unknown motivator.
The idea of being able to spread out in your world, to recline at your ease where and when you want underlies many an entrepreneur’s aspirations. It drives many during the long years of getting professional degrees, especially in the law and medicine. Those kids shooting hoops on inner-city asphalt, the rapper with the gold medallion around the neck, even the drug dealers and pimps, all want to live large. And, you might say, why not?
Yes, there’s the American dream. And, now the Chinese dream. In both cases you might say the dream is to live large in relation to poverty, to the uncertain rungs on society’s socioeconomic ladders. In that original dream the goal is a stable life, one with a home, enough food, savings, health care, education for the kids. And, yes, for many, maybe most of humanity, over most of history that goal would have been unattainable. In that sense these modest dreams represent living large.
But these kind of dreams have a way of metastasizing, like body builders on steroids, like an unchecked cancer. Instead of being a dream they become a nightmare of needs turned into desires and desires turned into lust. In this, its more usual sense, I think living large represents the corrupting influence of late-stage capitalism, where to gain more becomes its own rationale. Living large is not an aim, it’s a manifesto of unchecked wants that will, somehow, be satisfied.
Living small. Now there’s an aim.
