“No amount of inventiveness or energy is excessive if it results in the creation of leisure, the increase of personal freedom, or the provision of physical comfort.”

Brilliant introduction to this reading that is a discussion for our undeniable reliance on electricity.

It succinctly describes a western lifestyle in which we prefer to work smart instead of hard and strive to achieve those things that will bring us more leisure time and and methods that lead to easier ways of working. From scrubbing clothes with soap that burns your hands, wringing them out with your hands, and hanging them to air dry, to one machine that washed, wrings and dries your clothes all in one, the washing machine is just one example.

“Without power, pretty much everything we do, everything we use, and everything we consume would be nonexistent, inaccessible, or vastly more expensive and inconvenient.”

Can you picture something in your day that doesn’t require electricity? I could only come up with walking my dog, but when I come home to feed her, i taker her food front he fridge, something powered by electricity.

Watts eloquently paints a picture of our reliance when he talks about American power stations, “Stretched like a spider’s web across the entire North American continent lies an enormous network of power stations and substations and the high-voltage transmission cables that connect them.”

Envisioning this, I think about arguments for more environmental sources of energy like wind-farms or solar that would want to compete for this space.

Watts declares, “Built at vast expense over the better part of the last century, the power system is arguably the most essential technological feature of the modern world.”

Be that as it may, i’m not sure its been all uphill from there. With the expanse of electricity, has the cost been things like higher pollution? greater waste? and the rise of obesity?