>>It seems to me that most young people today can't live without their smart phones or a car.
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>FWIW, most of the young people I know have a cell phone _rather than_ a landline, not both. As for a car, whether you can live without depends where you live. Way too many places in this country don't have decent public transit, and so a car is the only way for people to get to work.

For three weeks we were without a car. Luckily, it was a winter in Virginia. The nearest grocery was just about one mile away, and that's the 2nd best of all the places we've been to. The best was the next location, where one was half a mile away, and that's because we were right behind a mall. Everywhere else, just getting bread and milk would involve 5 miles on the average. What we forget to buy served as a reminder for the next time, and we changed the menu many times because they didn't have this or we forgot to buy that. Going to a different grocery would involve at least two miles more, which we rarely felt was a good idea. It wasn't so much the gas, it's the time - the two things you need are on the opposite sides of the store, always, and they have only two registers open.

Getting the lye to make soap turned out to be a 35 miles drive.