Reference reading
Profligacy
The romance of extravagance can be financed by resources with a less romantic purpose.
Habitually indulging expenditure or consumption without fitting regard for the resources entrusted to one's care.
Imagine this: A designer makes a splendid festive garland from the studio’s last roll of protective packing paper. The finished sculptures wait beside an empty shipping box.
How the pattern works
Profligacy habitually indulges expenditure or consumption without fitting regard for entrusted resources. In a bohemian setting, extravagant living or spectacular presentation can be romanticized as evidence of artistic seriousness. The resource has other purposes and claimants, but its consumption is excused as part of an exceptional life.
A costly artistic choice can be justified. A performance may need a substantial space, a material may be indispensable, and pleasure is not a defect. Profligacy concerns the missing regard: what is available, what it was entrusted for, what the expenditure displaces and who bears the resulting shortfall.
What it costs the work
Necessary work can lose its means after optional display consumes them. Contributors may be asked to absorb delayed payment or improvised arrangements while the spending is defended as creative temperament. The project becomes dependent on a continuing rescue that the extravagant account refuses to count.
A distinction worth keeping
Miserliness refuses fitting expenditure; Profligacy consumes without fitting regard. They are not simply two numerical ends of one budget, because the purpose and claims matter. Greed seeks excessive acquisition and can coexist with lavish spending. Illness, poverty, a particular consumption pattern or a single failed investment does not by itself establish this habitual orientation.
What a useful response can change
Make the purpose of a resource explicit before spending it. Shared funds, borrowed equipment and a collaborator’s time deserve an account fitted to the actual agreement.
Compare the attractive expenditure with what it will displace. That can reveal a worthwhile trade-off or show that the celebration is quietly spending somebody else’s essential provision.
Where a shortfall has been created, the response should address the affected obligation and the decisions that produced it. Calling the aftermath an inspiring improvisation does not settle a contributor’s unpaid claim.
Questions for reflection
- What other purpose did this resource have?
- Who will be expected to improvise when it has been consumed?
Other perspectives
Wherever our reserve with regard to pleasure falls short of the most ascetic abstinence, he treats it as gross luxury and sensuality.
Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Read the source
Smith describes an excessively ascetic observer who condemns everything short of abstinence. That is an important foil: temperance does not mean calling every pleasure wasteful.
I cannot enter here into political investigation; but this is a certain fact, that the wasteful and vain expenses at present indulged in by the upper classes are hastening the advance of republicanism more than any other element of modern change.
John Ruskin · The Two Paths · Read the source
Ruskin’s historical polemic associates elite waste with political consequences. This site does not adopt that prediction as evidence; the relevant challenge is that supposedly private extravagance may draw on resources and relationships beyond the spender.