It’s easy to take for granted all of the modern appliances and conveniences that we use every single day. Our daily lives have become so very easy (physically) compared to how things used to be just a hundred or so years ago. We have electricity to thank for that as it is the lifeblood that keeps everything running. So it may be hard for us to imagine life without having electricity powering it.

Even in this modern time, there are still millions upon millions of people that don’t have access to electricity, and so still have to do things the old-fashioned, and physically difficult way. What is life like for them? Well, to get a better understanding, let’s imagine that tomorrow you wake up to a world without electricity.

The first thing you’ll notice is that there is no hot water for you to shower with. You’ll have to bathe using room temperature water. While that may not be so bad, it certainly isn’t as comfortable as you’d like it to be. But you get through your morning shower.

Breakfast is another story. If you want a hot breakfast, you’ll need to use either a gas stove or get a fire going some other way. Perhaps you already use gas in your home. Fine, but how are you keeping your food fresh? Without electricity, you’ll be limited as to how much food you can have in your home at any time. You’ll only be able to have a couple of day’s worth of perishables as without refrigeration, it won’t keep.

Now you’ve made it through breakfast and it’s time to go to work. How will you get there? No electricity means no cars busses or subways. You do have a couple of options. You could walk, ride a bike, or ride an animal to work. So take your pick. Just keep in mind that having a horse is a whole lot of work to maintain so it may just be easier to bike or walk depending on the distance.

So you make it through your work day and get back home (later than normal as your commute took way longer). Now what? Dinner? Same thing as breakfast.

By now it’s nighttime. That means that it’s dark. No electric lighting means that you’ll be having to do everything by candlelight or gas powered lamps. While it’s better than nothing, it’s not an abundance of light. So reading will be more difficult and straining on the eyes. Now, you probably won’t have all that much time to read as without electricity, you’ll probably have other chores to take care of. Like laundry.

No washing machines here. This means you’ll be washing your clothes by hand. Maybe you don’t want to do a week’s worth all at once, so to save your hands you do a little bit every day. So you spend your evening washing clothes in the dark. Wringing them out by hand gets old fast, but if you want dry clothes for the next few days you’ll have to.

See how important electricity is to our daily lives? So now try to understand just how important it is to conserve it. Yes, we do have plenty of electricity, but one of the problems we will soon face is that the resources which we use to generate it (fossil fuels) will be running out. We will need to switch to alternative forms of energy generation, and yes, while we don’t have the technology, it will take time and money to implement. So in the meanwhile, there is no sense in wasting electricity.

Conserving it is actually quite easy. There’s plenty of little changes you can make to your daily usage habits which will save power. You can turn off and even unplug (yes, that helps) appliances when they aren’t being used. You can wash clothes and dishes in only cold water to save on water heating. You can get power saving appliances like the electricity saver to help you with reducing consumption and waste. There’s plenty of things that you can do.

And you’d better believe that every little bit does indeed help. If everyone did their part to conserve energy, there would be a significant drop in demand on the power grid. That means less resources being consumed in the generation of power.