It’s dark out. Your windows are steamed over, caused by the temperature differential between your warm bedroom and the cold morning. Your alarm clock trips, and your favorite song blasts from it speakers. You wake up, stumble out of bed, flip on the lights, turn on the shower.
Little more than 100 years ago, just four generations, people couldn’t even dream of the kind of life you take for granted less than 60 seconds into your day. Automatic, clean central heating. A machine that wakes you up on time, playing a your choice of nearly any song ever recorded. Constant, instant, unlimited electricity. Constant, nearly instant, and nearly unlimited hot water, on demand.
We give a lot of credit to things like the iPhone. “This has more computing power than Apollo 11, you know.” But we don’t even think about the things that truly make modern life possible. Until they fail. When there’s a major power outage, cities instantly shut down. People don’t even know what to do. They can’t work, most of their entertainment options are gone; half of them can’t even cook. When your water gets shut off, you can’t shower, you can’t brush your teeth; you can’t really cook, either. If your heat’s ever gone out in the winter, you know how miserable it is to get out of bed in the morning.
These major inconveniences serve as important reminders. Without them, it’s easy to take our conveniences for granted for years at a time, since these outages get less and less frequent as our societies and technologies improve.
There’s no reason to wait for a real inconvenience. It’s easy enough to live a life of poverty for a day or two each year, as many ancient Greek philosophers did. Not only does it help us to appreciate what we have, it also reminds us that, even if we lost it all, we’d still be able to cope just fine.
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