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COMMON HUMAN COMPLAINTS THAT CAN BE SOLVED BY TECHNOLOGY

. . . technologies that you are totally going to act like you came up with all on your own.

You are in a unique position: very few people wake up in the morning and decide that today they want to invent civilization from scratch. Historically, most people wake up in the morning, discover that they’re hungry or thirsty or bored or horny, and while trying to solve those problems for themselves only end up inventing civilization by accident, if at all.

In this section we list the most common complaints humans have had throughout history, along with technologies you can invent that answer those very complaints, explained from first principles. Conveniently, this also doubles as the list of the most useful technologies you’ll need in your civilization! There are some obvious omissions that we assume you are already familiar with, including the wheel (because if you don’t know what that is, you have no business rebuilding civilization from scratch*); cooking food with fire (this was invented before even anatomically modern humans evolved, so if you can’t figure it out there’s hopefully someone else around who can),* and French kissing (which, if you haven’t tried yet, you should give a shot! With the right person, it’s actually not bad).

Technologies are grouped by the human complaints they address, which allows you to peruse conceptually adjacent inventions. If there’s something in particular you’d like to invent first, refer to the technology tree found in Appendix A: it illustrates which prerequisite technologies are required to unlock all the coolest stuff quickly.

Finally, all technologies in this section include a quotation that’s at least tangentially related to the invention under consideration, credited both to whoever said it first in your new timeline (you), and to whoever said it first in our original and unaltered timeline. Feel free to plagiarize these ideas, taking all the credit for them when you pepper your speech with these “bons mots.” It’s like you (are soon to) always say: Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.*