What We Can't Live Without

This month's Letter from the Editor in Fast Company is titled Things We Can't Live Without. Robert Safian's editorial begins with a memory of his dad buying the first television in the neighborhood and people coming over just to watch the transmission signal. From here he transitions to iPods and automobiles, and steps up to Facebook and Twitter as the new "must have" apps.

It's a strange world when you start looking at what various people define as a must. For example, I tweet, but to call it a Must Have part of my life is a bit of a stretch.

The other night when the electricity went out, I recognized that electrical power was a "must have" for me. Either that, or leave Minnesota, because any duration of time without electricity when it is nineteen below is going to freeze your pipes, and be generally intolerable.

Maybe we're just a little glib about what we think we absolutely need. I did a Google search for the phrase what we can't live without and came up with quite a few things to look at. The first list I looked at was at the NewsCred Blog, Michael Arrington's favorite technologies that he uses every day. GoogleDocs, Skype, Dropbox, WordPress, Gmail, Twitter, Amazon Web Services, Songza, Google Analytics and Mechanical Turk. My guess is that if these are the things Arrington needs to be happy, then when the electricity is out he's screwed, too. And to see Twitter listed again just makes me scratch my head. (Though I have already tweeted that I am writing about this here...)

Now I am looking at a Computerworld web article on 25 things we can't live without, and Skype is here, too, as well as iPods along with things like the Siber Systems RoboForm for storing usernames, passwords, and other contact data for websites.

The real question, especially for Americans, is how to differentiate between what is a luxury and what is a necessity. Are two cars a luxury? Is air conditioning a necessity? Think of all our appliances which we consider an absolute basic part of owning a home. For some folks, having "land, lots of land and sunny skies above" is a necessity. They simply don't want to be fenced in.

Here's another site with a study called What Americans Need: 1996-2006. The report compares trends over a ten year period. It's more realistic and runs this way. Car, clothes washer, clothes dryer, home air conditioning, microwave, TV set, car air conditioning, home computer, cell phone, dishwasher, cable or satellite TV, high-speed Internet, flat screen TV, and iPod. Interesting. Nearly everything here is dependent on electricity, including that car some day possibly.

I'm curious where music and art and friends would fall on some of these lists. It's also interesting how we take our clean drinking water for granted as well.

My cell phone probably falls close to the necessity realm for me, but a television does not. I still haven't figured out how to hook up the new box for HDTV. I ought to add it to my TO DO list, but my motivation just isn't strong enough. Hopefully I'll get around to it, but it took us five years to purchase the first B&W television we got in 1984... Evidently TV is something we can live without.

Some of these lists, and there are quite a few, are simply a way to talk about new things. The catchy title is an apparent exaggeration, but it does catch your eyeballs, and your imagination. What are the things you can't live without?