As I sit here with my laptop at my fingertips (literally, of course), my cellphone within calling distance, lights all around me, I wonder which one of these conveniences I could ever do without. I cannot imagine a world without indoor plumbing and heating, without two or three cars in the driveway, or without electric knives and can openers.

Okay, I kid: I could live very easily without any of those electric gadgets.

But it would be good to do a quick survey of inventions from the past 100 years that we just simply could not do without. And, conversely, which ones we could just as easily drop. For the record, there will not be television remotes, garage door openers, and automatic toothbrushes on my list.

If you can take a break from your automatic table-setter control, try to think of (or better, try to invent) something that would be worth inventing. After all, that's how that sweet convenience of yours arrived in your world in the first place: Somebody saw a better way of doing whatever – then promptly went out and created, failed, got up and tried again, and finally pulled it all together.

For me, in addition to my laptop and cellphone, I think a natural gas furnace, flush toilets, and electricity are near the top of inventions that I would find hard to live without. In the stationary supply department, I am grateful for loose-leaf paper, gel pens and post-it notes.

I laugh at those who feel they must have high speed Internet. Granted, I prefer high speed to slow speed, but I most certainly can survive quite comfortably without life in the cyber fast lane. It would be nice, but it's not necessary.

With the economic slowdown that is starting to happen, it may not be a bad thing to assess your comfort level and ask yourself the same question I hinted at: What so-called conveniences could you do without? What perks could you jettison, if absolutely necessary – while saving energy and money at the same time? Or, maybe you actually do need one of them – but three of them?

Four weeks without hot water over the past few weeks made me ask myself the same question. A gimpy oven for months made us do the same thing. A jet pump that went south (twice) in the fall had me recognizing that we really do have it good, even without constant water pressure. In other words, we love the regular hot water, two ovens in one kitchen, and water that flows at the twist of a tap – but we survived fairly well without them.

Okay, so we smelled like old socks for four weeks, but at least we all smelled in unison. Well, you might say that was quite a...feat.

This is just a test, a challenge and nothing more. But it's not a bad exercise to think through how many unnecessary toys we pad our lives with. So next time you open your tray of instant stew with an electric can opener, followed by "nuking" it in the microwave and then slurping it down as you work out on your treadmill, think this: Are all these things really necessary?

Your grandparents' version of the above might have looked like this: They would step outside while it was dark, chop wood for the fire and ice for the water; they would then heat the water with the wood and peel the potatoes that they grew in their garden. Anything else they added to their meal that morning would have been gathered, milked or dug. They wouldn't need the treadmill to finish my word picture because they had more natural exercise getting everything ready than a week of treadmills could provide.

Somewhere between the two extreme lifestyles above I'm sure there's a balance. Doing it by hand is a better way until a powered alternative saves time, money, and energy. Doing it yourself is a better way until your health or mind is compromised.

Just because I said all the above doesn't mean that next week I plan to write this column by hand, with two candles by my side, plus hop on my horse and ride the sixty kilometres to Bow Island. There's a limit to my back-to-nature conviction. After all, I couldn't travel that far without a CD-player and power windows.

However, I am happy to say that I will gladly give up automatic sock-warmer to show my sincerity.