In Épernay, the heart of the Champagne region, they drink champagne on a Tuesday. And on a Wednesday. And on a fairly unremarkable Thursday evening when nothing in particular is happening. It’s the drink of the region, of the meal, of the evening. The occasion is just being alive and it being lunchtime or dinnertime.
Somewhere between there and here, that got lost. Trying to sell something ordinary is a bad business model. It’s not a serious strategy. But I would argue otherwise. It’s the only thing we have left because everything we don’t have is being sold to us, and everything we do have is being sold back to us in better packaging. But what if no one could sell your life back to you? What if you just gave yourself permission to enjoy it.
We didn’t lose the Tuesday. We were just never sold it.
We are so practiced at postponing joy, so fluent in the language of later, that we needed the occasion to do the justification work for us.
The Good Life Is Elsewhere, Apparently.
When pleasure is not integrated into the fabric of our daily life we look for it elsewhere. We escape to it. We experience it through other cultures that never bought the productivity myth. That never accepted the idea that pleasure has to be earned through output first. That living well was always part of the work, not the break from it.
Why do you think La Dolce Vita works so well and makes us all want to get on the first plane to Italy? It’s the best example of making you feel like the good life is elsewhere. Another country. Another culture. Another version of your life that you have to travel to find. And we buy into it completely because we were never given the language or the permission to find it here.
But the good life isn’t just in Italy. Italy is just where it’s still visible. It’s well documented. If you speak to an Italian they would often say otherwise. Because to them it’s just their life. La Dolce Vita is what happens when you take someone’s ordinary life, strip out the context, the history, the infrastructure, the culture that holds it together, and sell the feeling to the people who need to be sold a better life.
La Dolce Vita is the perfect aspiration because it’s real enough to believe in and far enough away to keep chasing. It’s not a fantasy. There are parts of it that exist. I’ve seen it myself, eating at a local restaurant on a Monday evening, watching a family pass plates around and share wine at 11pm like it was the most natural thing in the world. And I’ve realised, this is something I could do back at home if I wanted to.
It’s easier in Rome but not impossible in London.
The point is to make your ordinary mean something instead of outsourcing it. Ordinary days make up most of your life. You will have many more Tuesdays in your own life than you will have elsewhere. And if you don’t add meaning to them, the only meaning you’ll have is the kind someone else sold you. And that meaning isn’t in your interest. It’s in theirs. And in their back pocket, likely going towards their next Porsche.
And you wonder why a lot of us are miserable. Not dramatically. Not in a way that’s easy to name or point to. Just quietly, persistently disconnected from our own lives. Going through the motions. Waiting. Always waiting. For the weekend, the holiday, the promotion, the relationship, the moment when everything finally feels like it was worth it.
And it never quite arrives. Because the next thing is always just ahead. And you’re perfectly positioned to be sold the next thing, ready for someone else to add meaning to your life.
The Real Investment
It’s actually a pretty smart investment. And it will save you a lot of time, money and effort. But mostly it will save you the cost of waiting for a life you’re already living.
The time you spent waiting for the occasion. The effort you put into earning the reason. The money you spent on the version of pleasure that came pre-packaged with permission. All of it in service of a feeling you could have had on a Tuesday for the price of a bottle and the decision that tonight was enough.
The investment isn’t the champagne. The investment is the permission. And once you have that you stop spending everything else trying to buy your way to it.
In this context, choosing to drink champagne on a Tuesday is giving yourself permission to enjoy your life as it is.
The Tuesday is radical because it has no product attached to it. Nobody profits from you deciding that tonight is enough. There’s nothing to buy. No occasion to upgrade into. Just you, deciding that this moment already means something.
That’s not a small act. In a world that runs on deferred meaning, creating your own is probably the most countercultural thing you can do.
Trendy vs Trendie
Waiting for someone to hand you the meaning. Borrowing someone else’s version of the good life. Getting on the plane to find something that was already here. Following the occasion because everyone else said it counted.
That’s trendy.
Deciding the Tuesday is enough. Opening the bottle for no reason other than it feels right. Making your own meaning in the undocumented ordinary. Living the version of the good life that’s already yours.
That’s Trendie.
The cost of waiting.
Nobody is going to hand you the meaning. And the only version on offer, the one that arrives pre-packaged with a reason and a ribbon, always has something attached to it. Always needs you to wait a little longer, spend a little more, achieve a little further before you’re allowed to feel it.
This is the opposite of living life on your own terms.
What living life on your own terms looks like is practising the art of drinking champagne on a Tuesday. It’s permission to enjoy life now, not later. It’s Tasteful Hedonism. Not excess. Not drinking for the sake of it or manufacturing joy out of nothing. It’s closing the gap between the life you’re living and the one you keep meaning to get around to. Integrating pleasure into your days rather than cordoning it off for the moments that have earned it.
It’s a practice. A constant tuning in. A quiet daily decision to show up for your own life as it already is. To stop treating the ordinary as the gap between the meaningful moments and start recognising it as the thing itself.
That’s why I say carry a bottle of champagne with you just in case. Not every day. Just more than you think makes sense. You’ll be surprised how good you get at adding meaning to the ordinary.
Stay Trendie x
Notes on Tasteful Hedonism® is an ongoing series about what it actually looks like to live well. Not later. Not elsewhere. Now, in the life you already have. Tasteful Hedonism is pleasure with discernment. Knowing what brings you joy, choosing it intentionally, and refusing to wait for permission. These are the notes from someone still figuring it out.