I know I’m going to hell — so let’s just get that one out of the way at the start. My sins grow more deadly by the day. The latest is Scott. I met him on a recent trip to America, and now I really miss him. He used to be in the army. He was tall and strong and didn’t mess around. When I put my clothes back on, I felt two inches taller.There are no Scotts in Ireland. I went in search of a massage last weekend — all right, so my sins aren’t that deadly after all — and the Irish version is so lame. Instead of Sturdy Scott, it’s the Lovely Girl massage. The girls who work in our “spas” are always lovely. They speak softly, have beautifully scented oils, and massage my stony shoulders with all the vigour of a Victorian consumptive. It’s pleasant but lily-livered. 

By the time Scott had finished with me, he’d realigned my “mommy shoulders” and “mommy hips”, all crooked from holding children. When Lovely Girl had finished with me, I smelt beautiful and my skin was soft, but my muscles were still hard and knotted.

As I complained internally (God forbid that I would actually voice my disappointment to the masseuse, thus giving her an opportunity to mend her ways), I suddenly realised I was going to hell. If all I can do is complain about a lacklustre massage, then a good roast for eternity is the least I can expect.

My problems are those of the affluent. Weak massages, the search for reliable tradesmen, the quest to keep a supermarket basil plant alive — these troubles are so inconsequential it seems sinful to even categorise them as problems. I should be grateful that I can get any massage, thankful that I have a house to which I can invite tradesmen, and you couldn’t even get fresh basil here until a few years ago.

It didn’t help that I had just finished reading A Woman in Berlin, an anonymously written diary that recounts the mass rape of German women by Russian soldiers in 1945. The author describes stoically and without a trace of self-pity two months of searching for food and water, the experience of multiple rapes, and the burying of the dead. A poor massage suddenly seems awfully trivial compared to the struggle to keep body and soul under such circumstances.

But what I can do? I don’t live in a war zone, I live in a cul-de-sac. This is the hand I have been dealt and, lucky me, it’s a good hand.

I got the country childhood: the third-level education, the home-cooked food, good manners and a strong work ethic. We are the result of the hard-working, self-sacrificing generation who reared us. I have a one-off house in the country and an extended family down the road willing to babysit. There is a disposable if inefficiently managed income. We have good health, plan landscaping projects and keep an eye out for wine bargains. But why is it so hard to enjoy? I live in constant fear of being considered smug and trite.

My generation was taught that if we worked hard and passed our exams then we would get good jobs, marry well and have a nice house. Now that we have the possessions and the good life, we are being told that our consumer lifestyle is the road to hell. We can afford to buy fancy food, but now it’s bad for us. We can afford to buy cars and travel wherever we want, but only in the knowledge that the cars are killing the environment, and we are killing each other with the cars. We can buy fashionable clothes, most likely made by Third World children. My tastefully decorated rural home is the epitome of ideologically unsound accommodation.

Then someone else tells us to be grateful that we have our dirty rotten material goods in the first place since we could be living in Africa or be sick or dead. Is there any way to win in this circular search for peace of mind? The Woman in Berlin said: “Well-fed nations wallow in neuroses and excesses, while people plagued with suffering, as we are now, may rely on numbness and apathy to help see them through.” So I wallow.

We delay our gratification and dream of the things we want. When we get them we either feel guilty or feel bad about complaining because they are not as enjoyable as we thought they would be. If I save up money, or am willing to go into debt in order to buy something luxurious, the least I should be able to do is either enjoy it properly or feel free to complain if it’s not right. Otherwise what was all the hard work for?

American Protestants claim credit for the work ethic, but Irish Catholicism, while not as industrious, managed to do all right in the end. Our parents went without so we could have something. But perhaps that’s the problem. It wasn’t just our parents who went without. So did their parents, and their parents. We’ve been delaying gratification for so long, we don’t know how to cope now that it’s finally arrived. It might seem instant now, but actually our gratification has been delayed about 800 years.

Ireland simply doesn’t have any tradition of having as many material possessions as it likes, so we don’t know how to approach all this leisure and luxury. What we’ve done is turn the leisure into work, since work is the only thing we feel comfortable with. Work is good, and indolence is bad: it’s too deeply ingrained in Irish culture to throw off in the mere 10 years of the good times. So we acquire things with the same determination as any other job. And it takes the fun out of it.

I’m not preaching the tired old line that consumption is bad in itself. I just wish we could consume in a more enjoyable way.

Take the spas. It’s all new to us, this massaging and steaming and scrubbing. But in Germany, public baths with saunas and steam rooms are quite ordinary. In Ireland the entire concept of a spa is in the absolute luxury category of experience. So the guilty thrill requires an elaborate justification of why we must go in the first place. The sense of entitlement has to be worked up with a mental listing of our hardships and the benefits that will entail from having the massage.

Meanwhile in Germany there is an unquestioning acceptance that steam baths and massages are inherently beneficial and should be available to the general population. They lost two world wars, but they still know how to relax.

Were Irish people so much poorer for so much longer that it will be another generation before we stop justifying the need for a massage or feel entitled to complain if it’s no good? Is work the only thing we are entitled to feel good about? What about the fact that if we actually stopped spending money on ourselves for a week then the whole Celtic tiger edifice would collapse? We’d be back in 1983, where everything was simpler and wholesome, and poorer too. People’s shoulders were sore then, but there wasn’t the slightest hope of a massage.

Our economic success depends on consumption, so really spending money on luxuries is actually a necessity. Self-sacrifice is only a good philosophy when there is little to sacrifice. We don’t need to sacrifice any more. Diligence is still a virtue, but let’s now learn the virtue in indulgence.