A modern convenience you are most grateful for

My grandmother grew up without fridges and her own mother (she died long before I was born) would put perishables in woven sacks and suspend them from a window during winter months. She also reboiled soups to kill bacteria, every day.

Obviously, we had refrigerators, but my grandmother was still in the habit of reboiling a pot of soup every morning. And she would refry leftover fried foods. All of it made the taste and texture of fried-and-refried food horrible, but it was impossible to talk her out of her ingrained habit. She appreciated having a fridge and she did not suspend perishables in woven sacks from windows during cold months, but she reboiled and refried leftovers.

I do not know how they kept perishables during warm months. Probably kept them in cellars dug deep under houses.

I should add to your list SquarePegGuy: MODERN fridges. The fridges I grew up with required maintenance. They had to be regularly defrosted. That meant everything was taken out, the fridge unplugged, water that would accumulate regularly collected and thrown away, then the whole thing washed, wiped dry, and plugged back in. What I remember from this laborious procedure was that my grandmother would keep butter inside a bowl of cold water to keep it cold while the fridge was being defrosted.

My aunt would also shout at me if I left the fridge door open for an extra split second when taking something out, such as milk. The idea was that you minimize the time the fridge is open. This is probably still a good idea from the energy preservation standpoint, but I live alone now and can afford keeping the door open when I take a half-gallon of milk out, pour from it, and put it back in, and nobody says a word. So I do that, enjoying the freedom to do whatever I please. Perhaps I should stop doing that.

And regarding pasteurized foods, @Nammu: we had pasteurized milk in the city but had to boil raw milk that was sold in the countryside. It actually changes taste if you boil and then cool it down.

I am currently grateful to any source of comforts and convenience and to life itself
My negativity comes from guilt and very bad years, but I still wish the best to the living ones on Earth

Gonna answer kettle and warm tea, heating system, music, healthcare

The non-slammable toilet seat. They're good, I got one

This one is not sth I need . After gaining weight, I have ample thighs and it does not hurt my anymore to sit on the porcelain without a toilet seat. When I was a child, it hurt me, i.e. the porcelain cut into the flesh of my thighs (our public restrooms typically did not have toilet seats) but just bare porcelain). But now I like the feel of cool porcelain against my skin. So the toilet seat is always up and the only reason I even have it is for guests.

Wait... Is it even porcelain? Or is it a type of ceramic?

Squatty potty. Everyone should get one.

Mine: dental floss. I love the feeling of freshly flossed teeth and gum surfaces and even the process of flossing. When I have my occasional bouts of depression and anxiety, which are thankfully short-lived these days, hygiene stops and when I return to normal afterwards, flossing is the very first thing I do that signals 'the crisis is over'.

I walk down memory lane and can't believe I used to live without flossing back in the day.

Art supplies and ready made canvas and paints, non toxic and ready to use.

Spoons and bowls. Could you imagine trying to eat soup? I guess you could use a cup, so I’m pretty happy for cups too.

I think it was actually eating lead paint that made Van Gogh so amazing. Amazing enough to remove an ear. Too good for two ears

On a slightly related art supply note, a modern convenience that I love are whiteboards. A bit easier to deal with than chalkboards, and us absent minded folk appreciate a place in our faces for reminders. Also post-its. And calendars. Very much calendars!!

They are pretty old, though. I remember feeling awe and almost indescribable trepidation looking at a tiny ancient Egyptian spoon, a museum exhibit. Several thousand years old.

Forks, by contrast... Those are what, several hundred years old, as far as the invention goes?

To correct myself: in some cultures spoons and bowls go far back, but not all. In others, some sort of a bread is used to wrap food and eat from. I am not sure how they deal with soups, though. As an aside, I have read in a culinary anthropology book that our modern souls that are pretty liquid are quite modern and pureed soups, decidedly British - more traditional peasant soups were more solid, like stews or oot-au-feu. I really like Teff, the Ethiopian sour spongy "bread" used to hold all foods. "Bread" in quotation marks because Teff is a grass and not a grain.

True, true. Although my psychiatrist thinks that it is a chicken and egg problem - did he eat paint because he was already psychotic or did eating paint make him psychotic?

Good call on whiteboards. I have one that is affixed to the fridge. Not only for Todo lists, but also for shopping lists and jotting down what I have in the fridge, leftovers and purchases. Allowed me to seriously cut down on wasting food because I forget it is rotting somewhere there

Might have been like modern day mental illness and drugs. You have a little mental illness and then do drugs and get a lot of mental illness (and do more drugs and get more mental illness until someone throws your asss somewhere).