Thanks for a nice article on the consequences of the daily comforts in our industrialised civilisation; energy is the key to all material transformation and maintaining any complex state of matter.

It appears we have become "kings of convenience", people attracted to devices that make chores easier or even take them away, so we have more time for consuming "goods", or "stuff" as the late David MacKays calls them in https://www.withouthotair.com/c15/page_88.shtml

; now we are trapped in consumerism, which Dave Ramsay articulates as: "The consumer world tries to encourage us to buy things we do not need with money we do not have in order to impress people who do not care or we don’t like."

Opposed to that is modesty, frugality, or minimalism which isn’t deprivation, but a conscious way of selecting desirable, useful and durable objects for the material foundation of our lives. (

Japanese minimalism "wabi" and "kufu", the art of resourcefulness. ). Beyond that, we could focus on simpler, mostly non-material activities such as education, science, art and care.