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.
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.
How’s the water in the Netherlands, out of curiosity? If you’ve been there, that is. Or Belgium, maybe.
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…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” ?
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.
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.
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.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.
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.
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.
Music, without a doubt. Specifically, being able to choose particular songs to listen to. I’d get pretty miserable after a few days.
Housing. (Again)
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?
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.
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.
Clean water on demand
Likewise, flushing the toilet and the shit disappears.
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?”
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.
Soap and clean water
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.
