Electricity.
If you lose electricity most people lose access to:
Hot water
Running water (if you have a well)
Air conditioning
Indoor heat
Television
Internet
Indoor lighting
And hot meals if you don’t have gas.Losing electricity would cut you off from almost all of your luxuries as we’ve become completely dependent on it over the last century or so.
it sounds like a necessity
It’s a utility and so I agree it’s a necessity. A luxury would be some of the things electricity allows like Internet.
The Internet access should be classified as a utility but good luck getting ISPs to stop lobbying against that
Yeah in the modern age internet access should be considered a necessity. There are a lot of things you can’t do without the internet (like get a job or pay bills).
Not necessarily, you could absolutely survive without electricity, I live in a predominantly Amish area that proves that.
It just wouldn’t be any fun.It does take a bit of preparation for the lifestyle that we are not ready for. Ways to store and prepare food, maintain temperatures, get information, illuminate spaces.
Hah, that’s fair
Yeah but no electricians no more electrocution… Think of the positives lol
Clean and well-tasting tap water. It sucks when I’m going to another country and they have chlorinated tap water
If it’s that important to you then an RO filter would be a cheap solution
Where in the world?
We have clean water in Austria, directly from the mountains without adding anything (just cleaning it with UV light to kill potential bacteria in most regions, nothing else. Not even that in some regions).
Some of the best and cleanest water worldwide, so whenever I go to another country I’m disappointed by their water quality.
Don’t tell Nestle, lol
Swede here who frequents Austria. I agree, and I love drinking the water while hiking in Austria.
If you visit Sweden, our water is mostly as good as the one in Austria. Some exceptions are Gotland because of high chalk (so? “Kalk”) levels.
PC world.
I haven’t thought about that jingle in years (decades?) but it came back instantly. And now it won’t leave.
Oh fun, here’s another:
There’s a magical place, we’re on our way there
With toys by the million, all under one roof…Another banger. Millions of Jeffrey
It’s got some pretty dark Edgar Allan Poe vibes:
“There’s millions” says Jeffrey, “all under one roof…”
If he’s a toy himself, then he’s selling out his own kind by cramming them like sardines in inhumane conditions and selling them off to the highest bidder. Despicable.
You probably wouldn’t know it, but “There’s a funky little place down on bayside drive”
“…where woman and children have to hunt to survive” ?
In the US. I feel the same about our well water. Completely untreated and so good.
Not all well water is untreated…
True, especially big community well situations. We’re the only ones on our well, though.
Clean water on demand
Likewise, flushing the toilet and the shit disappears.
Coffee. Can’t even stop drinking it when I’m sick bc I feel like ten times worse.
I gave up caffeine a few years ago and I was really surprised by how easy it was and how little I missed it.
Maybe it’s different for me but caffeine ended up being much more of a habit rather than something I thought I needed.
While I am trying to use the internet less since the past 2 years or so, I will freak out if it ceases to exist completely.
I wouldn’t even call it a luxury. Hasn’t been for years.
I miss when it was a luxury. Pretty fun times if you ask me.
Agreed
You bring up an interesting point.
Most people wouldn’t consider a cup of tea to be luxurious at all. But if tea was scarce and you only got one cup a year, it would seem absolutely amazing, a special occasion and you’d really savour the experience.
There’s definitely something to be said for luxury which is much more about rarity or restriction rather than the experience itself.
Break me? No. Really depress my mood? Probably no longer having Plex and my media collection. If my hard drives and back-ups all spontaneously combusted right after a trade war drove their prices through the roof x5 or something and I couldn’t afford to replace (and/or couldn’t find any to replace because of shortages) I would be quite sad. Additionally I’ve worked quite hard to curate my collection so losing it entirely in the first place would be depressing because of the amount of work required to rebuild it, encoding, scraping hard to scrape rarities, setting the posters just the way I like them, etc.
I would be devastated. I have three backups at the moment, but thinking about a fourth.
I was going to post this exact reasoning but you beat me to it.
Spices. Very much spices. If I was limited to like 5 good ones I’d make do but I have a drawer with like 50 spices in it I use regularly and it’s my happy place.
Same, one of the things that influenced my decision to buy my house was a long cupboard next to the hob that would be perfect for a 48 jar spice rack. The rack is now full and there’s a small crate of miscellaneous spices sat on top of the cupboard.
The only time I agree with the people going on about how we live like Kings in the modern world (absolutely fucking not) is about how many spices we can just have for cheap and not the cost of a horse.
100%
It kills me when I go to someone’s house and the only spices are black pepper and cinnamon. Salt does not count.
High-quality food. For me, food is one of the main sources of enjoyment, and if instead I’ll have to shove something down my throat just to satisfy hunger, I’ll get very depressed very quickly.
Housing. (Again)
Music, without a doubt. Specifically, being able to choose particular songs to listen to. I’d get pretty miserable after a few days.
Find a radio station you enjoy and experience new to you music
No such thing anymore. 50% commercials, 50% whatever music the overlords want us to consume.
Plus you can’t listen to an album on the radio which is the best way to listen to most artists’ work.
Yeah I think I would never have gotten into prog rock if I was limited to the radio. That would have sucked.
I don’t know, maybe oxygen.
As a diving instructor once told me, Air is overrated.
How does oxygen fit the definition of luxury?
Though that’s not really the point of your post is it? What you did was read and understand OP correctly but then thought, “won’t it be so hilarious if I make a joke and answered with something that you LITERALLY can’t live with out, instead of contributing to the discussion!?!?! Hahaha delightfully devilish, professorozone!”
That your comment is upvoted is disappointing. It’s Reddit tier crap.
Yeah, that’s exactly right. But also you missed the subtle undertones of how things are going so dystopian that soon oxygen may actually become a luxury.
Not sure why that upsets you so much. Just sit on the floor, cross your legs Indian-style if you like and take in three big breaths of air. Wooosha. Wooosha. Wooosha. Like that. You’ll like it. There’s oxygen in the air. Kind of like a luxury.
My headphones. I just love listening to music way too much.
Well luckily for you, apparently it’s now acceptable to just blast your music out loud in public.
Soap and clean water
Literally, depending on where you draw a line between luxury and important but not mandatory for most people, it’s air conditioning. We have three people in this household that do very poorly once heat and humidity starts to climb, including myself. Plus, uncontrolled humidity in the south ruins things, so there’s an increase in costs associated with whatever decrease in power usage would save. For us, AC is right on the edge of being a necessity, as in a medical thing.
But in a more literal luxury that serves only pleasure or want, chocolate. No nutritional necessity, and it isn’t like we all can’t do without it. But gods damn, it would hurt. A nice piece of good quality dark chocolate is the ultimate mini reward for me. Do something incredibly painful and time consuming, that bit of chocolate is enough to turn it from something that I’m weeping in pain trying to finish into something I’m able to get through before I break down. That’s a luxury, but fuck me if it isn’t something I lean on heavily as a crutch. I really don’t know what I would use to coax myself through really bad days where I’m barely functional but still have to function.
Man, I hear you. In tropical Mexico, whatever semi-dry goods we didn’t use up by the end of spring will be ruined and moldy within three days of summer starting. Most seeds won’t even germinate in like two months.
Indoor plumbing and summer time AC
