Hacker News Reader

Comment by doctorhandshake | Hacker News Reader

I’m all for minimalist travel but I feel like I picked up a number of cues that the author is buying and disposing of (somehow) items seasonally or even on an as-no-longer-needed basis. Hopefully that means donating the item and maybe even buying used to begin with but it’s not mentioned here. I don’t want to make assumptions but in the worst case this could be a very wasteful kind of minimalism.

View on HN

Funny thing is the list is not at all far from “latest Apple and arc’teryx” which I’d consider the consumerist side he’s complaining about but - some of those items are objectively really high quality and durable

I found this a bit odd, especially when the author mentioned they lose their apple watch a lot so buy an older one. It feels peculiar to buy such an objectively expensive high end item when you know you constantly lose it, and barely use any of it's features. To me that is continual overconsumption.

I can't pretend I don't have my own contradictions going on, so I'm not having a go at the author. But I did find it a little funny when reading it.

I do wonder if the sort of person who can lose a watch "frequently" is also the sort of person who would immensely benefit from only owning 20 things and having absolutely zero choices to make about clothes.

'One baggers', at least those who post online about it, are very consumerist in general despite the practice being about minimalism.

You'll find people posting about upgrading their bag from the $300 Aer Travel Pack, to the $400 Goruck GR2 because of style preference. I've seen someone talking about repurchasing items they already own in a particular color to match their packs color scheme.

I think the motivation for many has nothing to do with being anti-consumerist and more about just freedom to travel without paying-for/carrying-around checked-in luggage and all the other benefits of travelling light, which is fine.

Yeah, I've come to realise that this is much more of a hobby for people than a genuine lifestyle.

I think YouTube has caused a big increase in this. One bag, EDC, Ultralight - the videos are all completely the same. "Here's a bunch of things I just bought, and here's a bunch of things I've used for a month and am throwing away". With YouTube they can get paid to do it though, and get to add a new dimension to their hobby which lets them connect with others.

As you say, all of this is fine. I certainly can't cast judgement either, I for sure have my own issues with over-consumption.

Surely this keychain flashlight will be the one to change my life?

Even if the author is literally throwing away seasonal items, the environmental trade-off is that they probably purchase far fewer items than the average person.

This. The disincentive to buy anything is constantly present when you live out of a bag. It's an odd way to defeat the rampant consumerism of modern society, but it works.

Yet the author of TFA owns a Macbook, iPad, iPhone and Apple Watch. Sounds more like peak consumerism to me.

Sure. But for the fridge, TV, washing machine and car - which together contain orders of magnitude more embodied carbon and rare minerals than his pocket-sized gadgets - he's condemned by his lifestyle to sharing them with others.

How do you figure? I've had one swimsuit for 5 years & I store it in my dresser. He presumably buys one or more per year.

Similarly (and this isn't a judgment), the ultralight outdoor gear – you trade off weight for durability.

When it comes to ultralight hiking gear, don't think durability is a major issue if it just sees occasional use in urban environments and you take good care of it.

I've travelled w/ a Montbell Versalite and Arcteryx Cerium LT for the past few years and both are like new, each probably getting around 200-300 wears in primarily city use while traveling to over 40 cities. Just picked up a Montbell Travel Umbrella (3 ounces!) a couple months back as I'll be in Mexico City for awhile and it rains like half the year.

I've definitely had durability issues with some of the newer lightweight gear even with fairly casual use. But mostly not just urban use to be fair.

I was wearing some Uniqlo puff jacket the ul community recommended on a trip to Italy. I brushed up against a pillar at some ruins and it snagged on the rough material and exploded into a cloud of down that the heavy wind blew all over a crowd of tourists.

Now I wear sturdy cotton, linen, leather, denim, and the extra weight is just a couple more calories burned.

I have hundreds, possibly over a thousand hours on mine and it is significantly more delicate and expensive than the Uniqlo one, which I had owned previously.

To me packability and efficiency reign supreme, and I just reflexively know I’m wearing a delicate item and react accordingly to my environment when I wear it.

It’s similar to the sunglass paradox. For many years, I owned fairly cheap pairs and lost them often. Then suddenly I spent $300 on a pair of Oliver Peoples… had them for 10 years, finally gave them to an ex-gf who loved them more than I did.

You can in fact change semi-reckless behavior when the quality of the item dictates it. Perhaps the extra anxiety isn’t worth it, but this is an article about one bag travel - which I do - so it fits.

if you travel a lot... maybe the co2 saved from not lugging around a cheap thing offsets the production waste.

In the limited amount of experience I’ve had with researching these things, embodied carbon can be a much higher number than you might think, even with something as simple as a cotton t-shirt. Odds are that shirt had already sailed around the world once or twice by the time you buy it, and it might make its way to another continent once you’re done with it as well.

> Odds are that shirt had already sailed around the world once or twice by the time you buy it,

That's like... 40 grams of CO2 for those 2 trips for a t-shirt. Aka, a 2 min uber ride.

Shipping containers are incredibly efficient.

Modern large container ships consume about 200-300 tonnes of fuel per day, and could carry 742 millions t-shirts [1]. It takes 16 days to do something like Shanghai - LA, so that ends up being like 20 grams per shirt per trip.

[1]: https://www.howandwhy.com/15-mins/huge-ship-shirts

I did make it sound like transport was contributing to the lion’s share of the embodied carbon and I shouldn’t have - it’s more in the production process. Would have been well served by an ‘in addition’ in between those statements.

Fair, didn’t mean to strawman.

If you are flying with any regularity, you are completely exhausting your carbon budget. The remaining carbon budget is the CO2 if emitted will lead to 2C warming. IPCC estimates it to be 1150 GtCO2 in 2020 [1]. Which is ~140 tCO2/person over however many years we use to spend this. So if we want to limit warming to 2C by 2050, that leaves a budget of 4.7tCO2/person/year.

A transatlantic round-trip alone can be 2.3tCO2 [2].

[1] Page 48 https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6...

[2] https://co2.myclimate.org/en/portfolios?calculation_id=82395...

The elephant in the room. Even one flight per year per person is basically too much. Flying, above all else, is how middle-class folks (like those in this thread) explode their carbon footprints. For obvious reasons very few of them want to hear this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com