221–230 of 429 posts
In real life one needs at least 5 pairs of shoes.
I lived out of a backpack for two months on a Pacific Crest Trail hike. I got comfortable with it and told myself that I had overcome my materialism, and could henceforth live happily without a lot of stuff and conveniences. Not so much. Now a couple of decades later, I've got a house and garage crammed with stuff. Yesterday I had a plumber here working on a leak, and this morning I have no running water, and here I…
> It turns out that climbing on the hedonic treadmill is practically effortless, but sliding down it is full of splinters. Not sure if I'm missing a joke, but the whole point of the analogy being a treadmill is that there's nothing to fall down. Regardless of positive (running forward) or negative (going backward on the treadmill) life changes, your happiness will probably stay relatively consistent because you're on…
That's not the point of the treadmill analogy.
It's rather that you need to keep walking to maintain your stationary position, just like on a treadmill.
Meaning the level of headonism you become accustomed to fades/blunts with time, and you want more, so you need to keep moving forward to stay at the same (hedonic) position (level).
What the parent said, then, is valid: "climbing on the hedonic treadmill is practically effortless", being on a hedonic treadmill is our default psychological state. But to slide off and accept less hedonic level is very difficult.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In other words, it's not a problem if you're one of the wealthiest people ever to exist in human history.
At no point was this positioned as a "for everyone" approach. It requires resources and compromises. None of the gear in this article is particularly cheap. That said, the cost is not significantly different from other forms of living. The average rent in SF/NYC/Seattle/London/etc. is sky high as well.
For western standards they're not particularly expensive either. The most expensive things are the Macbook and the iPhone, and like 30%-40% of the US population has one or the other.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
if you travel a lot... maybe the co2 saved from not lugging around a cheap thing offsets the production waste.
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 2.3tC…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People freak out about this, but all it boils down to is bringing enough socks, underwear, and shirts for ~5-6 days, 2 pairs of bottoms, and (depending on weather) or a combination of 2 and/either sweaters and an outer shell. Wear the biggest stuff (pants/sweaters) on the plane. After that be willing to do laundry, which will often put you in a position that's outside the tourist mainstream and force you to slow down…
> Freak weather events can be used as an excuse to shop for clothing, too (the best rain jacket that I ever bought was in this situation in the Netherlands - it was expensive, but I'm still using it a decade later - a fantastic souvenir that people always complement me on when wearing it). This doesn't make any sense. Going going to a random shop to buy a rain jacket is inevitably going to be worse than doing careful…
I like that this guy's ethos is something along the lines of "better dressed homeless person." It won't last, though. Anyone of any means falls into the materialism trap. If you ever want to build anything, create art, open a business, all of that requires "stuff." If you're just some yob blogger dude then I guess you can make it work. I doubt very many women find it appealing. I see people living out of their cars w…
That's a sad indictment of the state of our culture. Canping is cool. Being an outdoorsman (or outdoorswoman, etc) is one of the greatest things a human can do.
I feel like if I dropped my desire to wear a variety of clothes (collared shirts, jackets ...) I could almost imagine this one bag life, especially when each item is designed to be modular and multipurpose (S-biners!)
I would have a few issues with this particular list though, mainly all the polyester clothes (my only poly clothes are "technical"/sports oriented, otherwise cotton/wool/linen etc...) Not sure exactly where I gained this dislike, I guess I just prefer natural fibers for comfort reasons.
Also, as a hardware-oriented engineer, I would have a hard time packing all the lab equipment/projects up. Perhaps could be solved by finding a good hackerspace, but fundamentally being interested in real-world physical technology means more "stuff" to carry around.
It would definitely be interesting to see a yearly stats breakdown of how many times I used each object. There are definitely many zeroes in that list.
E: Also, I'm too used to Linux and too attached to freedom (in principle) to switch to a Mac, even though the M-series power efficiency is unmatched.
I've done this before (not indefinitely, but for many trips around the world.) I agree with the author on a lot: 1) it's not a good way to live long term, 2) traveling with as little as possible completely transforms the traveling experience, 3) zero-bag travel is great, 4) a good quality small bag with well designed compartments is critical, 5) M-series Macs are the only way to go, 6) two thumb drives is very conven…
I find myself wondering how this person pays for their nomadic lifestyle. Presumably they have some sort of remote job; it would be interesting to know how much they have to earn to offset their expenses.