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Comment by futureshock | Hacker News Reader

I’ll offer up my one bag take that’s very much against the mainstream of one bag aficionados. I love traveling light, but think the carefully curated list of expensive branded items are counterproductive. I’d much rather the bag and everything in it to be functional, ugly anonymous and replaceable. If the bag gets stolen, I should be able to walk into the nearest mall and replace everything that was in it without a second thought or single shed tear. And rather than plan for every eventuality, I would much rather buy a cheap thing on the spot and donate it as I am leaving if it can’t carry it home.

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I check out OneBag stuff on the internet every so often. Sometimes I'll find good travelling tips or secondary uses for items. But so much of it is so wrapped in brands and buzzwords and precision it makes me laugh. It reminds me that even if I share some of the ideals with this community, I probably wouldn't travel well with a lot of them haha.

I'm with you: the more replaceable and maneuverable the better. My focus is on freeing myself from as many logistic problems as possible while remaining tolerably comfortable. I've travelled with one bag in a few different countries, doing a few different kinds of things. Every trip I get a little better and carry a little less.

I think things like this are very boring. Functional, frugal, practical, efficient but boring. Which is a good thing. But people like to romantecise over the most mundane things that it soon becomes a fad or a statement and a community. Soon, the sellers swoop in and turn it into a brand and a lifestyle to get you to buy the expensive stuff.

Seeing this right now also in the "bikepacking"/"gravel" community. Sure, custom bike bags and nice performance wear are comfort-increasing costs, but very quickly things skyrocket away from functional/utilitarian toward things like brand fealty, collective hype, etc. If you drill down, you will usually not be able to justify an expensive part vs a cheaper alternative (esp. used!), except for things like electronic derailleurs, etc.

In the hiking community travelling light has become an obsession for some people. Some going as far as cutting their tooth brush in half just to shave of a few grams. I get spending a fortune on a lightweight tent and gas burner which can save you several kilograms in your backpack, but when you go down to shaving off 10g and less I think it has moved away from the practical over to a hobby in and of itself. Nothing wrong with that of course, just saying.

It's the same culture these days in bikepacking and one bagging really.

Arc’teryx is my weakness

A late friend of the family was a Presbyterian pastor and an avid hiker. He'd do things like cut the covers off his palm-sized Bible to save a few grams.

Remember when it was just called bike touring or bike camping?

Wisdom and making money are often somewhat at odds to each other.

I am reminded of a TV show with two guests, one selling gadgets and the other a famous author. It was a disaster. The famous author kept saying "Why would anyone do that? You can just do blah instead and it's better for thus and such reasons."

But you can't readily make money off of blurting "This is a better method for X that takes less time and hassle and doesn't involve selling a gadget."

I'd be curious to see that... sounds amusing, even if unintentionally so.

Like the Jack Ma and Elon Musk debate.

I feel bad for the ridicule Jack Ma got after that. There's clearly a language barrier in play.

I agree that packing lists often devolve to the Minimalist(tm) Shopping List.

For me, packing light is about lack of hinderances. I carry two bags (!!!) because I find the organization to be easier, but I can still ride on the back of a hired scooter and walk 5-miles across town if needed. I'd rather just pack more underwear than spend time washing it in the bathroom sink.

I live in a small town where the shopping sucks.

If I am going to a big city I am inclined to leave with one bag but go shopping (I like socks and underwear from the Nike store) and fill up another bag to bring home.

I can get another if I break it, so a clay cup trumps a grail. - Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, classical Urdu and Persian poet from the Mughal Empire

... via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

> I’d much rather the bag and everything in it to be functional, ugly anonymous and replaceable. If the bag gets stolen, I should be able to walk into the nearest mall and replace everything that was in it without a second thought or single shed tear.

I do that if it fits the purpose off the trip. I buy clothes during the trip if needed and that clothes are a nice memory of the trip when I wear them at home.

But quite often, my trip stars as a business trip, so I have to carry my laptop, or I want to do photography and I want to carry my camera and other equipment. For that I need a reasonable bag.

I do have a fairly carefully curated pile of stuff I travel with. But it's mostly a variety of practical/comfortable synthetic or merino wool shirts, pants, a light rainjacket, compressible outerwear, etc. It's not replaceable except as a stopgap with some cheap stuff from the nearest mall. But it's not fancy brands. It's just stuff I'm comfortable wearing, looks good but not fancy, and I can wash it in a hotel sink.

It does depend a bit on your needs. If you're only traveling for a few days, or you have convenient access to laundry, most of the hardcore one bag stuff is unnecessary.

A lot of the expense comes from working out clothes that fit multiple needs and can be reworn multiple times without getting disgusting.

(I will say: a good bag is actually worth the money almost-regardless of how long your trip will be. Well designed straps and load arrangement make a substantial difference in how your back and shoulders will feel after carrying it through a trip. Matters less if you're doing 100% car travel, of course.)

If you're one bagging for any amount of time I highly recommend washing clothes while on your trip. A laundromat works wonders, but bar that I often bring some clothesline and hang clothes that I've washed in a dry bag. Unless you're camping in high humidity conditions, you should be fine.

Oh, for sure. It’s just the difference between clothes you can wear a few times and only once -- it mostly means you can afford to either pack a bit lighter or go longer between needing to find laundry.

"I’d much rather the bag and everything in it to be functional, ugly anonymous and replaceable." I agree with all of this except 'ugly'

I travel fairly light, and if Im down to one bag, its a durable Chrome "diplomat" messenger bag. It's a workhorse for me.

Your approach seems a little like applying certain ultra-light hiking philosophies to one bag travel. E.g., Don't buy a fancy usb-powered travel toothbrush - buy a plain manual toothbrush and cut off the handle to save space and weight.

I admit, I did take some inspiration from the ultralight community. Setting off for an expedition with something on your back that would hardly make a good shopping bag is a pretty radical take and I think can be applied to other areas of life as well. Ultralighters are also famous for finding bits of paper from construction sites, a little aluminum from the garbage and breaking mom’s sewing machine to create their life sustaining equipment. It’s often a good antidote to consumerism and traditional minimalism.

Yeah, it's a ridiculous take because the specialized things you have in a nice onebag setup are not going to be easy to find in a random store. Just replacing the backpack itself is going to be a major issue if you are outside of the United States.

Exactly, which is what makes the mainstream approach very brittle and difficult to recover from failure. If even replacing the bag is a major project, then my vacation can easily be ruined. You say “nice onebag setup,” I say “white elephant that wants me to spend my whole trip focused on it.”

planning everything around rare failures seems silly to me. If an expensive item has good value, adds utility over a less expensive option, and can still be functionally replaced in case of rare failure mode, i don’t see any white elephant in that picture.

Other than contact lenses/glasses, I'm hard pressed to think of anything in my one bag setup that I couldn't replace easily should my bag be stolen or lost. Electronics (phone, usually the only thing I travel with), documents, and cash notwithstanding. Those would likely be on my person at all times so for them to be stolen would mean I'd have bigger problems than replacing my clothes and backpack (like having been mugged).

The only reason my setup is worth more than $200 (maybe $300) total is because of my glasses and contact lenses.

I take an iPhone and a laptop of course, but if you look at some of these one bag packing lists, they run into the thousands with every last sock being highly technical, boutique, and exorbitant.

there’s literally nothing brittle about a $15 dollar pair of merino socks though, which is the argument I was responding to. If you lose it you can still buy a cheap backup and still have socks, nobody is spending all their time and energy worrying about losing a pair of $15 socks. Some things really do provide more value for a higher price, but everyone’s utility curve is different for each item.

Mostly though i think it comes down to the old joke “everyone who spends more than me is wasting their money on exorbitant whatever and everyone who spends less than me is a cheapskate.”

Here’s the top rated packing list on the One Bag subreddit, which is pretty representative of what the community likes.

https://jeremymaluf.com/onebag/

The list looks like the very definition of brittle to me. Every single item is from a different manufacturer, possibly rare, bespoke, or hard to find (a Japanese version of a highly technical jacket, underwear that even says it’s hard to buy in the description). We’re way beyond preferring wool socks here.

I mean, if the objective would be to replace with exact 1-to-1 replacements, sure that's brittle. But someone listing "Levi's Jeans" may also be hard pressed to replace them with the exact brand when traveling in many countries (ignoring knockoffs and outside of major cities). If the objective were to replace the bag with good-enough locally available things, the listed items are all trivially substitutable for local items, outside the tech gear (which I'd consider a problem for anyone wanting to travel with expensive electronics regardless of their style, one bag or twenty bag).

Sure, that’s exactly my philosophy, to bring things that can be trivially substituted or replaced. The electronics are also trivially substituted, grab another black rectangle of glass off the shelf and have the cloud repopulate your profile.

Then we are in agreement, a list of mostly clothes is not a "brittle" set of items. They are all trivially replaceable.

Then I think we agree with each other, but the One Baggers would not agree with us since they are gear obsessive compulsives and we do not seem to be. At the risk of creating a straw man, I don't think that community would generally say their pack list is trivially replaceable.

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