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.
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.
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.
100%
It kills me when I go to someone’s house and the only spices are black pepper and cinnamon. Salt does not count.
- Air conditioning
- Chocolate
- Coffee
All 3 are things that are reasonably likely to have troublesome accessibility in my lifetime.
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
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.
Hot showers and a bidet.
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. (Again)
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.
Coffee. Can’t even stop drinking it when I’m sick bc I feel like ten times worse.
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
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.
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.
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.
that picture exactly
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.
