Why the EDC Gear?

Whenever I talk to people in person, that’s the question I get the most: why are you carrying all this gear and what the heck do you need it for? This is a fair question, and depending on how much I want to engage with the person, I have two answers:

1. It’s just my thing.
2. I like to be prepared.

It’s genuinely very easy to be incredulous when you start looking at everyday carry (EDC) posts and blogs. People are carrying a full pharmacy, or they have an auto-deploying mini-gun strapped their inner thigh and spend a lot of time talking about reducing chaffing from the belt fed rounds. Some people very seriously carry two to three knives. The community loves to quip and quote military sayings that they often don’t understand and only heard in a movie.

It’s a big joke, or so it feels like even to me most of the time.

Every year or so I tend to revisit this topic, to defend why you should carry things, and talk about why I carry these things. I go into specifics about why I carry a bag; a knife; a flashlight; a first aid kit; or whatever else the taste of the moment is.

Maybe it’s getting older, or my general crankiness, but I’ve come to realize that all my past answers were simply beating around the most obvious bush: I carry this shit because I like to be comfortable.

Most humans don’t like to be uncomfortable. There’s many people who tell me that they tried carrying a flashlight, but it was very uncomfortable in their pocket, so they don’t carry one. I rarely push back when someone says that — I get it.

So today, for this year’s iteration of justifying my EDC gear, I want to talk about how comfort is the biggest reason for any of this, and how you can optimize what you carry for your own comfort.

Explain Yourself

When I think about comfort, I think about sweatpants, a good recliner chair, a glass of single malt scotch, and a really shitty action movie. I am certainly not carrying around any of that when I am out and about, or working, so let’s talk about comfort itself.

There’s many facets to comfort, but when we are talking about gear aiding in comfort, here’s what I mean:

• Can make things easier for me.
• Can improve physical comfort in some way.
• Can improve physical safety in some way.
• Can reduce anxiety in some way.
• Can protect me physically in some way.

Some of that can be ambiguous to think about, so let’s talk about this in the framework of a humble flashlight, even the one on your phone:

• I can use it to see somewhere dark, reducing my difficulty seeing in that spot. (Easier)
• I can light up a dark room and see in the dark corners. (Physical Comfort)
• I can use it to illmunate my person when walking at night. (Physical Safety)
• I can rest easy knowing that if someone flips off the light on me, I won’t be lost in the dark. (Anxiety)
• I can attempt to temporarily blind someone/thing with it.(Protect)

I see those as the five main areas of comfort that any gear you carry can aid with. Not every item can do all of the areas, some may even tackle only one area. But most will cover a couple.

So to answer the question of why carry EDC Gear at all, well for me it’s simply because I place a very high value on being comfortable. Maybe some of the above reasons are not reasons for you, that’s still ok, you don’t have to cover all the bases. I don’t actually think of my flashlight as a protection device, but I am also not someone who spends a lot of time thinking about protection like that.

If you spelunk r/EDC on Reddit you are likely to get a strong sense that the focus there is on protecting themselves physically though. Whereas my focus tends to be on reducing my anxiety, then improving my physical comfort, while hopefully making things easier for me generally.

To that end, you have to stop and think about what bothers you during your day, what makes you uncomfortable, and then consider what item might help make that more comfortable. It might be as simple as a finger nail file, a lens cleaning cloth, or a $20 bill.

Once you start down that path, you can end up with a bucket of gear you are considering carrying. Which brings me to the next part of this post.

How to Think About Adding or Subtracting From What You Carry

I’m imperfect at this task, as I tend to accumulate tons of gear in my bags — often very redudant items because I simply forgot I already added something. So I have two ways of tackling keeping my gear loadout to only what I want to carry.

1. Question what you add.
2. Be ruthless in removing things.

It’s easy to not add things, but that mindset is both impractical, and antithetical to what I preach here. You should carry stuff, you should carry stuff you want to carry, but you need to be careful not to carry too much bloat.

Adding

I always want to have the gear I need and want, but I never want to need a huge 30L backpack to carry it all. So, I’ve found the best way to control this is by controlling how you add things.

My first step is simple. I ask and answer one question:

What do I absolutely need to carry?

For example, I’d assume most people will answer something like: phone, wallet, keys. If you are a kid in an American school, you might change that to: phone & water bottle. Kids are obsessed with hydration, good for them.

But, absolute, is not the only benchmark. Think about that term as “I would be fucking pissed at myself if I didn’t have these things” to use as your litmus test for this use of ‘absolute’. Which means, for me, this would also include: watch and cash.

The second question is as simple:

What do you want to carry?

The want here is broad, but is best to let yourself go crazy with it, we will curate in the next section. For me, the want are things like: handkerchief, knife, flashlight, band aids, tissues, power bank, notebook. For you it’s likely to be different things — but it is important to note that these are simply wants, disconnected from absolute need.

So gather up all your gear, and put it in those two piles: need and want.

Where

This is an intermediary step, but I like to put this step in even now when I work through my gear. I create three buckets for ‘where’. You should tailor this more for yourself, but generally if you are going to EDC something, then you have to carry it somewhere, I have three ways I carry things:

• Pants pockets
• Jacket pockets
• Bags

For the jacket, I might not always wear a jacket, same as how I might not always have a bag. So you need to be actively thinking about the where — I lay stuff out on the floor often in those three piles. Your list might look different, maybe you hate carrying things in your pants pockets, so you always have a bag. Maybe you never wear a jacket. Maybe you never wear pants?

It’s best to sort this out before you get to removing anything so you get a better sense on how much you need to remove to fit in those different storage areas.

Now comes the trick. You have a need and want pile, and you have defined your locations you could carry them. Anything in your need pile, needs to be moved over to a new pile, associated with whatever where pile(s) you have, which you will always have with you. For me, this is my pants pockets or worn. So everything I put in my ‘need’ pile, needs to move over to my pants/worn pile. Then divvy the want pile however you see it fitting in your other where piles.

Removing

Ok, so maybe you dumped out your bag you take to the office, and emptied your pockets, purse, or jackets. Or maybe you are getting started and you made your list and pilled stuff in neat little piles. Whichever way you are going, the next step is to slim down that gear as much as you can. Even if it is already slim, I always try to slim it down more.

Before you start, you might be tempted to buy things which are smaller, lighter, or better. Maybe you noticed that your charger could be a little smaller, or maybe you can get a different thing to cover three of the items with one. I’ll advise you wait — you need to use this stuff and carry it to see what the actual issue is. Maybe if you buy that thinner charger it won’t easily fit into the outlet area of the one outlet you constantly want to use it on — oops. Test with what you have first.

Remove is not about replace, instead, you look at this as binary: it stays or it goes. I have a few parts to this to help the prune.

Part One: Daily, Weekly, Hopefully Never

There are a few parts to this purge, part one: daily, weekly, hopefully never.

Let’s say you have two piles: on your person (pants pockets, or jackets, or purse) and office bag. You now need to separate the items in each pile into one of three categories based on how often you think you’ll use that item:

• Daily: I can’t think of a day when I wouldn’t use this (phone, wallet, etc)
• Weekly: I don’t use it everyday, but I do often enough that it’s at least once a week — if not more (Membership cards; powerbanks, etc)
• Hopefully Never: I would be pretty pissed if I needed this and didn’t have it, but I really hope I don’t need it (first aid kit; extra contact lenses, etc)

What you don’t do here is purge anything, this is only sorting. The idea here is: it’s ok to carry a tourniquet, even if you hopefully never use it — that’s kind of the point. That’s why the hopefully never pile exists — it’s not a pile to purge just because.

Part Two: Do you normally have access to this already?

For part two, I ask: is this readily available where you normally exist, and if not, where it doesn’t exist would I be able to use one if I had it?

A pretty easy way I think about this is to visualize your normal day. Let’s take a plugin phone charger, I’ll then think about all the times when I would not be around another spot where there would be a charger (office, house, friends house), and then I’ll try to think whether or not it’s possible to even use a charger at those points if I had one (plugging in at Starbucks versus on a bus). It seems silly, but for most people, you’ll likely spend a pretty significant amount of your time very close to a charger you could use if needed. And the times when you are not close, you’ll likely not be close to and outlet to begin with.

So let’s say you realize maybe you don’t need a charger, but you want to charge, so power bank. Well as it turns out, there’s fewer powerbanks floating around in the world for you to use, but they are easily useable just about anywhere.

Now, that’s not the only question here, it’s now going back to part one and combining it with part two, and using that to modify your piles to create a purge pile with the stuff I can’t likely use, or would be near any time you could use it:

• Daily: if you use it daily, then it doesn’t likely matter much you are around them to borrow/use. However, the exception is cases where you might keep pens or chargers at your office and at home, so why carry one in between if you don’t use it daily in between. You’ll need to contextually go through that pile.
• Weekly: you get to purge a lot in this category, if you only use it at the weekly level, if you are around it when you need/could use it, then get it out of this pile to the purge pile. This level should be pretty empty by the end.
• Hopefully never: here you need to strip out the extraneous while keeping the ‘prep’ type stuff. So you might keep the tourniquet, and guaze, but drop the micro-USB cable that might come in handy sometime. Drop the water purification tablets which you often question if they have been smashed to powder, and keep the blister bandaids.

Alright, hopefully your purge pile is filling up. You’re basically putting anything you are unlikely to use, or things you are often near in a purge pile.

Part Three: Comfort-Value Add

On to the last part — part three: what’s the comfort-value add?

So you have three piles now: on your person, in your bag, and purge. You have three piles within on your person and in your bag: Daily, Weekly, Hopefully Never.

Now congrats, you are done with the Daily piles. That’s the stuff you really are going to want to carry. If you don’t agree, then rethink that pile.

For the Weekly and Hopefully Never you have one last question to consider: how much better is my life going to be if I carry this single item for the next 6 months and never use it, but then suddenly I do use it? Is that amount so much better that it is worth carrying it in both weight and bulk for that entire time leading up to when you need it?

Two examples of what I mean here:

1. Protein bar: let’s say for me that’s a hopefully never item, as they largely taste like shit. But the times when I might want it, well I can eat it and there are likely to be no other options around. Ok, so if I carry that for six months in my bag, and then go to eat it — how happy am I? For me: marginally happier. It’s not good to eat, it’s not my thing, and nine times out of ten, I would rather wait until I can buy something fresher — because after six months in my bag that bar is going to be beat up pretty good. So I purge this from my bag.
2. Tourniquet: well this doesn’t go bad, I swear I hope I never need it, but when I need it there’s zero time to go find and borrow one, and if it ends up saving anyone’s life the return outweighs me carrying it for 60 years, let alone six months. So I keep it.

The way you think about those two items should be different from how I think. It’s your thought process which matters here. Some people will value a bandaid, while others will not.

Packing It Back Up

Alrighty then, you’ve purged a ton, here’s how you pack it. Daily first, hopefully never second, and weekly last. Weekly is your weak column of gear, and easily left out for the most part if you don’t have the space in a bag.

Everything you need daily should be compact enough for what you do daily, such that you can always keep it on your person. In a bag or not, whatever on your person means to you.

A Visual

Ok, I took my daily dad bag, and combined it with my office bag stuff. Here’s the dump of all that gear (Normally this gear is not as duplicated, but I had two bags, so there is duplication. Also this would normally be in more pouches, but I took it out of those for the photo):

Now sorted by where I’ll carry it, and how often I’ll use it:

Ok, after considering how easily I might be able to get to stuff where I would use it, I created my purge pile (I also purged out the duplicate items, to help with visual clarity here):

Lastly, here’s where I am after considering if I would be good with carrying the Hopefully Never and Weekly gear for six months before using it:

Hopefuly this helps answer the why, the how, and then keeps you from going overboard. I run through this mental activity a few times a year, but I am also constantly changing bags and testing new gear. I would think for most, doing this once a year would be enough — though maybe not for those who have read this far.