Private space. I used to share one room with my siblings. It was alright as a child, but I don’t want to go back. And I know that many families around the world have very little space for two, three or four generations living under a roof.
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.
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.
Yeah but no electricians no more electrocution… Think of the positives lol
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).
Electricity
- Air conditioning
- Chocolate
- Coffee
All 3 are things that are reasonably likely to have troublesome accessibility in my lifetime.
I can hear to say coffee, but AC is at the top. I live in a tropical country.
Chocolate is nice, and I love it but I could drop it.
We moved to a new apartment - and a big rent increase from 5 years of inflation-pinned rent to now c$4/sqft/mo - just for A/C . Would do it again.
oh
a/c
yep that’s the one
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.
AC units are really not expensive as long as you install them yourself
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.
None that would “break me” if I didn’t have them, but I spend the vast majority of my free time on my computer (by choice, I have friends and outside activities I can go to if I want), and whenever I’ve had to be away from it that’s always been the toughest part.
healthcare
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.
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.
Biggest one would be AC, followed by cheap electricity, and internet. Maybe frequent sex too. To quote that recent Mengzi post 食色性也
Partner says filtered water. My more luxury item may be homemade seltzer water
that picture exactly
Housing. (Again)
Clean and well-tasting tap water. It sucks when I’m going to another country and they have chlorinated tap water
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.
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.
How’s the water in the Netherlands, out of curiosity? If you’ve been there, that is. Or Belgium, maybe.
Don’t tell Nestle, lol
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.
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” ?
If it’s that important to you then an RO filter would be a cheap solution
Hot water!! I don’t remember how I survived childhood
We used to only have an outside toilet, covered in the fattest moths and spiders you’ve ever seen. We had a boiler that would cut out every fourth time it was used. I also don’t know how I survived childhood. It’s weird how what you get used to
Oh man, that’s a lot. At least our toilet was indoors, even if our plumbing was prone to breaking.
