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
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.Hah, that’s fair
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.
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).
Yeah but no electricians no more electrocution… Think of the positives lol
Air conditioning. Near the coast in Texas it’s more or less a lifesaver.
- Air conditioning
- Chocolate
- Coffee
All 3 are things that are reasonably likely to have troublesome accessibility in my lifetime.
I think AC will be the most reliable if home solar takes off. The other two though…
It’s still prohibitively expensive to buy AC units in the first place though. Vast majority of homes do not have AC pre-installed.
Music, without a doubt. Specifically, being able to choose particular songs to listen to. I’d get pretty miserable after a few days.
Toilet paper.
(I’d argue that’s more a necessity but) Bidet plus a a toilet rag covered in the stains from your previous toilet rag adventures?
Housing.
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 was going to post this exact reasoning but you beat me to it.
I would be devastated. I have three backups at the moment, but thinking about a fourth.
Caffeine
I’d be broken for a little while but tbh I think I’d be better off in the long run
I would normally say this too, but it’s surprisingly easy to get off caffeine. I’ve gone weeks without it, to usually slip up and start using it out of habit… but I don’t think I would miss it if caffeine suddenly just vanished from this world. I’d just slap my knee and say “huh, remember that weird drug we all used to take in the morning?”
Around 5 hrs to fully metabolise caffeine. Physically you would be fine in a day.
The habit, however would take longer to get over. That depends on your psychology, I know I can’t just replace my morning coffee with tea, because it doesn’t feel right.
I usually have my last coffee at around 2pm, so by the time I get up in the morning, there is no caffeine in my system. The feeling of drinking coffee and tea is different for me, it’s not just about the taste.
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.
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.
I don’t know, maybe oxygen.
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.
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.
Clean water on demand
Likewise, flushing the toilet and the shit disappears.
