Asklemmy

Clean and well-tasting tap water. It sucks when I'm going to another country and they have chlorinated tap water

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.

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.

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.

Hot showers and a bidet.

Music, without a doubt. Specifically, being able to choose particular songs to listen to. I'd get pretty miserable after a few days.

Toilet paper.

Coffee. Can't even stop drinking it when I'm sick bc I feel like ten times worse.

Housing. (Again)

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.

Caffeine

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.

Clean water on demand

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.

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.

Soap and clean water

Indoor plumbing and summer time AC

My headphones. I just love listening to music way too much.

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.

A/C

I don't know, maybe oxygen.

that picture exactly

Hot water!! I don't remember how I survived childhood

Contact lenses. I know I could use my glasses, but I put them down and can't find them half the time. I am blind enough to be absolutely useless in most situations without corrective lenses.

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

healthcare

Meat, specifically ground beef

Electricity

Cheese in general. Chocolate as well. Clean water is a necessity, but I guess hot water on demand? While I like eating beef and chicken I probably wouldn't be that sad overall if it went away.

I genuinely think I'd go insane if I wasn't able to buy Brie or Blue cheese. I don't need it every day of course, but any less than once every two months would be unspeakable

Sharpening stones and files. I can't imagine using dull knives. I can't stand knives duller than hair popping sharp. I have excellent knives that hold a crisp edge and I sharpen those every 30 minutes of super fast chopping (10 seconds on a 9k stone).

Not just knives but scissors, trowels, shovels, cooking spatulas, dust pans, vegetable peelers, can openers, toenail clippers, all need to be sharp. Not being able to sharpen all of those would be a tragedy.

If you are delaying getting into sharpening, just do it. It will serve you for the rest of your life, and I sharpen every single day (I'm a woodworker). Its truly a luxury to have sharp tools, all the time. So satisfying.

Aside from that, chocolate. The cravings will never go away.

Air conditioning, but I would argue that is a very expensive necessity.