The best art doesn’t come from comfort.

And it definitely doesn’t come from five-star resorts, infinity pools, or 23 course degustations. It comes from rawness. From hunger, constraint, and the places where you have to make do. Status and luxury polish away the edges, but it’s the edges that cut deepest.

Homer spoke to this. In the Iliad, food was never about the act consumption, in fact it was the opposite. It was ritual of order, philosophy and politics bound together. A medium through which the divine and the mortal worlds touched. To eat was to acknowledge hierarchy and to honour the Días: the choicest cuts burned on the altar, the smoke rising as an offering, the remainder divided among men. Sacrifice, portioning, the pouring of wine in equal measure, these gestures gave shape to community a structure that bound gods and men, friends and enemies alike. This is what takes us beyond primal instinct for survival: to congregate, to share, to pay tribute, to forgo consumption and transform it into meaning.

But modern life dangles a counterfeit: a pretend luxury. The curated resort that stages authenticity without ever letting you touch it. The perfumed lobbies, the polite scripts of staff trained to smile in a way that is never theirs. It is all surface. Service as theatre, not hospitality. Comfort presented as experience. A simulation of meaning.

Luxury is sold as transcendence, but often its a pale imitation. It’s status signals wrapped in marble and linen: the right table, the front row seat. These things look like meaning, but they’re hollow. They flatten experience into possession, and possession into theatre. You are never buying the food, or rest, or youth or beauty, instead you’re paying to be part of an illusion that you get to be at the centre of.

And yet it is boring. Predictable. Dead. The five-star hotel feels like a fish tank, water filtered, glass polished, movement confined. Nothing unexpected ever happens. No ritual, just routine. No rawness or community. Just the pantomime of care, pretend smiles in exchange for real money and pre-calculated tips.

Fortunately, just 20 minutes up the road served as a reminder to what matters more.

A $2 taco in Tulum. The courtyard with concrete floors where the DJ is local (shaking a maraca over a microphone), staff laughing together as they serve drinks, hospitality that comes when genuine life on display. We weren’t the centre of attention. We were on the sidelines, witnessing something authentic, messy, human. But it made us part of it, this is community. It’s rawness.

I keep returning to ritual. Routine is mechanical, a sequence of tasks until habit replaces thought. Ritual is different. It’s ancient, meditative, close to mystical. A taco on the street, from a bain-marie under the scorched Mexican sun, with a Michelada in hand. The charcoal smoke, the carving of pork, the plastic chair that wobbles on the pavement. This is ritual: the performance of something simple elevated by care, attention, community.

Humanity once measured itself against gods, myths and our ancestors, they were scaffolds for meaning, boundaries for morality, and shared stories that tethered us to one another.

Status, luxury, consumption have become our false pantheon. So what does it mean as we wade through a godless world, a world continuing to divide us socially, economically and spiritually?

It means resisting reduction. It means memory, ritual, and story. It means to share a meal in heat and dust, to sweat beside another, to feel the rawness of existence and not shield it with gloss. It means to love in ways unmeasurable, to create not for status but for survival of the soul. It means to hold paradox: to be beast and poet, mortal and dreamer.

Perhaps to be a human today is to long for meaning, when the structures that once carried it have collapsed. It is the hunger for connection, for ritual, for something more than comfort. Maybe it has always been our responsibility.

So for me, the best experiences, the best art, the most inspiring design, they don’t come from a desire for, or to be, luxury. They come from authenticity. From valuing the real. We live in a world of smoke and mirrors, one that grows harder to discern by the day. In an age of generated content, uniformity, and endless imitation, perhaps being yourself is the greatest luxury of all.

Be the taco 🌮