Fontana Labs asks:
In a nice post about the dangers of the hedonic treadmill, Ben A wonders what luxuries would be agonizing to give up. His list: no roommates, in-house laundry, car. . . . Other candidates? What would hurt to leave behind?
I don't regard a car as a luxury, but I miss my bike fiercely, and am saving up for a new one. (One that will live inside) In house laundry, which I am now enjoying for the first time, is pretty sweet, but not that big a hedonic improvement over in-building laundry. Laundromats are appalling, especially if you don't have a car and the nearest one is a quarter of a mile away.
My votes:
1) Sunlight. I didn't realize I cared until I lived in a cave-like apartment which required 24 hour electrical lighting for a couple of years.
2) No roommate
3) New clothes. When I started out as a journalist, my salary was low, my taxes were and my loans and rent together were over $2,000 a month. I couldn't afford things like meat or new clothes. The meat I didn't miss, but after several years of unemployment, all my clothes were slightly tattered, stretched, and vaguely out of style. By the time I got a raise, I understood, for the first time in my life, what Victorian authors had been describing when they made their heroines shabby: I looked frumpy, and couldn't do a damn thing about it.
4) A full sized stove
5) High speed internet
That's funny, I can't live alone. Hate hate hate it.
1)Enough heat and air conditioning so as to be continuously comfortable in my home.
2)High speed internet, with extra-special pain from forgoing music and on-line content subscriptions
3)Restaurant meals
4)Amazon Prime. The ability to simply conjure any book/game/DVD/household item within two days without leaving the house would be extremely painful to give up. $89/year lowers the number of errands I have to run by approximately 70%, saving a conservative two hours per week.
Hills on the horizon. I lived in rural Indiana for two years, and was driven nearly batshit insane by having nothing but flat roads and flat horizons to look at and walk on.
A safe and trouble free parking spot for my car. I will never return to living in Brooklyn, even though I work there... oh, the horror, the horror..
Anything involving freedom from other people's freedom is a luxury I value most. "Hell is other people" was co-opted in some post today, but it is often right. I don't want roommates. I don't want to carpool. I don't want neighbors on 3 sides, above and below me. I want to minimize interdependency with people I don't know all that well.
jeez, you guys are all Yankees. Air Conditioning!!!
The luxury it would be agonizing to give up? Time.
Above based on the horrible winter when I lived in a house that had board walls and no insulation.
"Hell is other people" was co-opted in some post today, but it is often right.
So I say this not to scold, because it is used generally all the time, but just out of habit: the existentialists didn't mean this in a broad, "other people suck, man" kind of way. The specific context and meaning of the statement is that hell is other people because they snap us out of our own self image. We all have visions of ourselves that, regardless of how self-critical or self-hating they may be, we are comfortable with. But other people--other subjectivities-- force us to confront the possibility of a discrepancy between our self-identification and our outward presentation to the world. Other people trouble (and sometimes destroy) our illusions about ourselves.
I'd have a hard time giving up arguing with the acolytes of various secular religions: vegans, tax protesters, Paulinistas. It's a total waste of my time, yet I can't seem to stop.
The two most educational experiences I've ever had were going without enough food for several weeks, trying to survive on a few hundred calories a day, and trying to survive on 3-4 hours of sleep per night for several months. Let me eat, and let me sleep, and I'll be just fine. I suppose anyone who has been forced to live with severe chronic pain would define the absence of it as the ultimate luxury.
RL,
don't forget the UCC redemption nuts!
to answer the query, given the current schema, I'd say the U$D's status as 'reserve currency' would be the luxury most missed, if gone..
Sleep, modern toothpaste, and high-speed Internet. In particular, my health and mood both deteriorate fast if I don't get adequate sleep for more than a week at a time.
Ice cubes.
I'm with Will Allen.
1. Reasonable health
2. No chronic pain
3. Regular sleep (when you have an infant, you'll understand)
4. Enough food and clean water
5. High speed internet
Most of mine have been at least partially voiced:
1. Central Air/Heating - Yes it seems whiny, but physical discomfort is distracting. Clearly we're talking luxury here, but the ability to focus on reading or computing without interruption for "turn the fan/window-AC on/off, put on a sweater to ward off the cold, cold drink to ward off the heat" is quite valuable.
2. High-speed Internet - I don't even sit around surfing the web much at home, but I've come to depend on things like Google Maps, Wikipedia, Gmail, and even Vonage, as regular services.
3. Car - not only for the freedom of travel, but for the feeling of home, ones own space, which is utterly forfeit on the subway.
4. Well equipped Kitchen - Megan, I'll see your stove and raise you a dishwasher, plenty of counter space, and a decent oven.
One way to answer that is to say that I think I could be very happy living on a boat. For some reason, I remember when I was a kid, one of my Mother's friends remarked that all she needed in life was a quonset hut and a library card. I know just what she meant, but now I'd take a sailboat (which is kind of an inverted quonset hut) and fast internet access instead of the library card.
Really, I think I could fit everything I want in there. If you are happy reading on a screen (as I am) you can now have arbitrarily large book, music, and film libraries in no space at all. What else? I'd miss a car if I didn't have one. And my bike (well, OK, bikes, but I could probably be happy with only two). And even though I'm not any good, I'd miss having a guitar to mess around with.
So, bottom line, a boat, a marina with high-speed internet, a parking place for a car, and a bike-rack.
Not terribly original but
1) No roommate - this is actually more necessity than luxury, thanks to unpleasant past experiences resulting in calls to 911 and therapy for PTS. I don't sleep well with other people on my side of the locked door.
2) Buying books instead of borrowing - just having them around to pull out and read pieces of at random makes me happy
3) Scooba - hate hate hate washing floors
High speed internet would be on there if I didn't need it for work.
Vicodin. Many of you have mentioned as throwaway answers "no pain," or the like, but for me, Vicodin is the luxury I would be unable to enjoy anything like my current quality of life without. I take it to get to the level of pain-free functioning that allows me to do my job and run errands and spend time with my loved ones in ways that most people take for granted.
I constantly marvel at the power contained in that one tiny pill, and I marvel at the accident of fate that allowed me to be born at a time and in a place where such pills are available when so many people whose pain is much worse than mine have not been so lucky.
I could never give up:
1) My computer/cell phone/mp3 player, which are kind of my entertainment holy trinity.
2) I don't have a car here in Phoenix, but used to have one when living in NJ and NY, and I miss it,so if I had one now, I would not give it up. You don't know how easy some things are until you don't have that car.
3) My two best friends in Idaho and NJ.
4) Chinese food (I think fondly of the HOp Kee in Chinatown off Mott downstairs); Pizza (as in NY pizza, not Az pizza); Tower Isle Beef patties, which I used to buy all the time at Pathmark, and which I cannot find here in Phoenix; Turkey on whole wheat with provolone, dab of Hellmans, plum tomato and hot peppers.
6) Air conditioning/heat when needed.
5) High speed internet
Every six months, I spend a week or so at my parents' country place, with dialup internet. After 2 years of this, the data are in: I am more productive without high-speed internet.
Not that I'm getting rid of it in my house, obviously.
Depends on what one defines as a luxury: I tend to define things that I would have trouble dealing without as necessities.
Anyway, stuff I would really miss:
1. Living fairly close to the center of a city.
2. Internet.
3. Vacation travel. After 6 months or so without an overseas vacation I tend to become very restless and somewhat mean-spirited.
I'd miss air conditioning, too, if I lived somewhere below 60 degrees latitude. :)
I'm not going to list things like indoor plumbing or electricity since it seems everyone else is assuming that they are not luxuries.
1a Time
1b Money
I can think of nothing more important then having the time and money needed to deal with whatever life throws at me. As we mentioned earlier its not even the specific "six months of living expenses" but just the ability to not agonize over small to medium unplanned expenses. In a similar way, the ability to have enough unpreallocated time is critical to my well being. Any extended situation where down time or lost time is critical leads to way to much stress to be worth it.
I once lived in a tent for two months. I've gone years without a car, and 9 months without a phone. I spent June and July in eastern Georgia without AC. None of that bothered me. Most of the items mentioned are luxuries to me. I've never had to deal with serious chronic pain, but I had the typical gut distress when I was burning out of a job, and I'm very glad to be past that. I'd say that nearby solitude in nature is the one thing I have that I'd truly hate to give up.
1) Multiple computers. It is very nice to not have to argue over who can use the computer.
2) Cars that don't break down frequently. By the time I got rid of my old Jetta, I was spending way too much just keeping it running, so I let other aspects of it, like the lack of a working heater, go because I couldn't afford to fix them on top of everything else.
3) Phones with pre-programmed contacts. I barely even remember my own phone number anymore, let alone anyone else's.