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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

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 am bravely holding back tears. My inner dialog is "this is unacceptable!" It turns out that climbing on the hedonic treadmill is practically effortless, but sliding down it is full of splinters.

hombre_fatal 1y ago
Yeah, when we stop moving, it's so easy to start hoarding. I lived in Mexico for 10 years with just two duffelbags of clothes and essentials. I could carry both on a plane unchecked and be anywhere with nothing left behind, and I loved it. Now I look around me in my apartment I share with my girlfriend and have things I wouldn't have even conceived of, like a gaming PC with two monitors (for what??) and a closet full of clothes as if I don't wear the same 5 things.
- TimorousBestie 1y ago
  > like a gaming PC with two monitors (for what??) There’s nothing like the pleasure of idling in a pointless MMO on one screen while half-watching youtube autoplay on the other. Alternate Monster with White Claw and you’ve got peak hedonism.
  - riversflow 1y ago
    You missed the geekbar and the penjamim. For max effect also put on a twitch streamer in a different game, listen to imported pop music or edm, and idle in a discord. Oh and have a collection of fidget toys on your desk.
  - Mr_Eri_Atlov 1y ago
    My ideal is 3 monitors One in the middle for a game One to the right for a video One to the left with systems stats and an RSS feed
  - jimbokun 1y ago
    To each his own. This sounds terrible to me. Now bouncing between multiple Champions League games in the middle of an afternoon with easy access to good espresso…
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- LeifCarrotson 1y ago
  I met a family who had just moved to Wisconson from Italy last week. The four of them (Mom, Dad, ~14yo son, and ~12yo daughter) packed everything they were going to bring with them into a backpack and two checked bags each. Incredible! What would you pick? I have a garage and a shed (OK, fine, it's a 24x36 barn) and a basement and a home office that barely contain the enormous quantity of my stuff at home. And yet I honestly think the highlight of this summer was waking up to the sunrise on one of the remotest parts of the Appalachian trail through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, with no possessions that wouldn't fit in a 22L ultralight backpack - including several of the same items as this guy's kit. On the one hand, most of the stuff is replaceable, "fungible" if you like, rather than sentimental. On the other, I keep it because I like to have certain capabilities, like cooking and auto repair and home building - I can't fit a tablesaw or pressure washer or food processor in a backpack; I've got a rack of 24 giant totes in the garage with painting supplies and plumbing supplies and bike parts and specialty auto repair tool cases and on and on that each occupy more volume than the one backpack this guy lives out of. I also recognize that this is a colossally inefficient way to allocate things among a group of people: I'm not going to pay a painter $1500 to do a crappy job to repaint my bathroom when I can do it myself with far greater quality for $100 in paint and a couple hundred bucks worth of tools in a giant tote, and neither are most of my neighbors, but this means that a sizeable fraction of people in the neighborhood live around our own personal totes of painting supplies. If I was going to pay someone else to build and repair and maintain and clean the house/apartment/condo/hotel that I live in (when I'm not in a tent, that's only about 5% of my time), and to take care of the cars and bikes that I ride in and on, and to cook the variety of food that I eat, and on and on, I would have a lot less stuff. If I bought tools to do these tasks that I would use once and then sell/give/throw them away...that would be unaffordable for me. One of the lessons that my Dad passed down to me is to never buy a thing unless you have the resources in time, price of consumables, tools, and space to clean it, maintain it, fix it, and store it - those are real costs beyond the sticker price of a new toy. Where does the money come from that allows one to sleep in hotels, ride in rental cars, travel in airports, and eat in restaurants for years on end?
  - Arainach 1y ago
    >Where does the money come from that allows one to sleep in hotels, ride in rental cars, travel in airports, and eat in restaurants for years on end? If you keep your standards modest, the math isn't as bad as it intuitively seems. A $100 hotel per night is the equivalent of a $3000 mortgage/rent. And if you're living out of one bag you don't necessarily need that and probably have cheaper options like hostels (or tent camping) available. If you're working a software job or have worked such jobs long enough to have a few million in assets gathering interest, the cost of living isn't prohibitive.
- exe34 1y ago
  I have a load of crap I've accumulated over the years, but I try to regularly look at and consider everything, with the aim of simply imagining life without it. I'm reasonably confident that I could get rid of most of it without missing it much if I had to - but for now I'm still holding on to them in case they become useful again. It currently costs me less to keep them than to replace them in the future.
- mr_toad 1y ago
  You can’t even carry one duffel bag unchecked on a budget airline anymore, unless its a very small one. Some of the cheaper airlines even charge extra for overhead luggage.
  - hombre_fatal 1y ago
    That might be true for domestic US flights, which I don't have experience with, but every airline between US and Mexico, or inside Mexico, has an option for 1x carry-on and 1x "personal item" where the personal item just needs to somewhat fit under the seat in front of you. This goes for Mexico's budget airline Viva Aerobus too.
- tdeck 1y ago
  I'm assuming you didn't cook much if at all during that time?
  - hombre_fatal 1y ago
    I cooked. Everywhere I've lived had a pot, pan, cutting board, knife, etc. And I'm sure I bought some so-cheap-its-disposable kitchenware from time to time.
    - tdeck 1y ago
      Makes sense, I was thinking even a minimal kitchen setup is about a full duffel bag worth.
AaronAPU 1y ago
I think in general we fill whatever amount of space we have available. Nature abhors a vacuum.
- bloomca 1y ago
  I believe any free space we have will be taken unless you actively fight for it. And while it is hard to maintain free space, clearing up taken space is even harder -- the discussion is usually what to put instead of something.
Aurornis 1y ago
> My inner dialog is "this is unacceptable!" It turns out that climbing on the hedonic treadmill is practically effortless, but sliding down it is full of splinters. For me, in situations like this the frustration comes from having invested so much into something that isn’t delivering what it was supposed to. For example, when my 20 year old car broke down it was an inconvenience, but I could also shrug it off because I got my money’s worth out of the car long ago. If an expensive brand new car broke down I would be inconvenienced, but the situation would be much more frustrating because I spent so much on a new car to avoid these issues.
beaker52 1y ago
> 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. Same. Exactly the same. I have often reflected that I have never been as happy as when I had the least stuff, either. I often wonder if it’s a) correlation or causation and b) whether the stuff is caused by dissatisfaction or the dissatisfaction is caused by the stuff, or both. Either way, I’m currently undergoing an intentional downsizing in my life, toward minimalism. Not the kind where I use it as an excuse to buy (more) expensive minimalist gear either. I’m shedding hobbies and interests that I have because I believe that they’ve become distractions that I bury myself in. Replacing them is far from my mind, but prising them out of my fingers is a very real challenge. It’s hardly backpack living, but it’s definitely moving in that direction.
- rockostrich 1y ago
  As always, moderation is important for any normal person. I think that applies to minimalism as well. Use it to cut unnecessary stuff out of your life, but unless you're some outlier then it's probably not good to try and live the most minimalist life that you can without causing some terrible mental health effects along the way. > I’m shedding hobbies and interests that I have because I believe that they’ve become distractions that I bury myself in. Maybe you just haven't found the right hobby? Hobbies should feel rewarding, not like a distraction.
  - beaker52 1y ago
    Of course. And perhaps? For me, the reward comes from the learning. (Who would have thought, being a software engineer by trade). Luckily my brain has a self-invalidating cache, but my home, not so much. Perhaps I will find the right hobby, but it should not be something that involves the accumulation of things, because the things weigh a hidden cost of possession. It’s this hidden cost that hurts, like a tax, an inefficiency of the mind, or being. It’s insidious because it’s almost impossible to attribute the friction with the possession, because you’re often not actively dealing with it, but it’s there. It’s like, you know you have 32gb of RAM, but for some reason you’re only working with 20gb but you can’t inspect what’s stealing the other 12gb. It’s only after removing things from disk, do you start to see the RAM getting freed up, and then you begin to appreciate the extra mental resources.
rockostrich 1y ago
> 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 a treadmill and there's nowhere to go. The live out of a backpack lifestyle is definitely a unique way to experience the modern world and I'm sure it's fulfilling for the author, but you can even tell in their post that life caught up with them somewhat and they needed to start staying in one place a little longer in order to maintain social relationships. Their linked post about walking every block of Manhattan and tracking all of their movement since 2015 feels like the exact opposite of a minimalist lifestyle and it seems to me like they live out of a backpack not out of some anti-materialism lifestyle, but instead just as a practical way to fuel this obsession with traveling and tracking. I admit, I've seen the author's Instagram story about walking 100k steps in a day in NYC and watched the whole thing because it's interesting, but I also take that and posts like this with a grain of salt. I'll happily take my horde of shit I need to get rid of in the garage over obsessing about how I can optimize tracking my every movement.
- msluyter 1y ago
  Perhaps the joke is that the valence of going backward or forward isn't equivalent. IIRC, some studies show that people will generally accept smaller gains to avoid the possibility of loss. Eg, loss has a greater (negative) emotional impact than equivalent (positive) gains.
  - vacuity 1y ago
    > I don't think it's reasonable to compare the risk of suffering a large loss with the risk of missing out on a large gain. If your annual income is $N, missing out on a gain of $N is bad, but not nearly as bad a suffering a loss of $N. - A comment I saw elsewhere on HN today It's quite rational, in many cases, to consider loss of an object X worse than gain of X. A less rigorous example I like to use: it's far easier, and unequal, to kill a person than revive a person.
raffael_de 1y ago
Two months isn't really that long.
- dolebirchwood 1y ago
  Maybe, but as someone who's done a 4-month backpacking stint, I was over it after 1 month, so I think even just that amount of time is enough to make an impact psychologically. By month 3, I was acclimated to it, but still eager to be done with it. (As an aside, the experience actually made me less enthusiastic about nature and gave me a deeper appreciation of civilization. Never in my life did I have such deep gratitude for having a flat paved sidewalk to walk on.)
  - delichon 1y ago
    After several weeks I got to a campsite that had a picnic table. It was such a pleasure to have a place to sit upright and prepare my dinner. I'll never take one for granted again. After getting used to doing everything on the ground a table and a bench are a luxury experience.
    - Damogran6 1y ago
      We're in a mode where we're 'camping' with a 5th wheel trailer. It has COMPLETELY altered my travelling experience in ways I never expected. Being in Nature, with a clean bathroom and warm shower and cold beer makes the experience amazing. More in line with this thread: Our house is full of stuff. It's a long story that ends up being: four adults living in the space that holds two comfortably. Having the trailer lets us spend time in a relatively uncluttered environment. IT's a reset that lets me not get quite so worked up about the time I spend not-camping. None of this is, in any way, cheap.
ortusdux 1y ago
we forget quickly we grow with our container we are all goldfish
jameslk 1y ago
Your IKEA Nesting Instinct kicked in. The things you own ended up owning you
- dylan604 1y ago
  Did we just get a visit from Tyler Durden?
  - kridsdale3 1y ago
    Hey! We have the exact same briefcase.
carabiner 1y ago
I thru-hiked the PCT in 5 months 10 years ago. Same experience. I remember eating on the trail 2 bricks of instant ramen for dinner every day and being utterly content. It was the most raw form of living I've ever experienced.
65 1y ago
Maybe one good thing about the torture of living in NYC is you get used to the torture of living in NYC. My very small, very expensive apartment has had no running water throughout the work day for the past two weeks because of water main construction (which I get woken up to at 7am every day). There's a jerk chicken restaurant next door to my apartment that blasts music all day long outside. Roaches and mice and rats. Long crowded subway commutes. I do hate this life in various ways, but I guess it toughens you up and you get used to it.
- yard2010 1y ago
  This resonates deeply with my personal experience, why does everyone like this? Is this becoming magical at some stage?
  - lmm 1y ago
    Earning good money is magical, and having so many services available within strolling distance (or at most a subway ride) is magical. Noisy neighbours, vermin, and unreliable water supplies are problems that should be fixed, but there are good reasons so many people choose to live in cities.
- adastra22 1y ago
  Or you could just move? Plenty of very nice cities without any of that.
jeremymaluf 1y ago
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adolph 1y ago
> I got comfortable with it and told myself that I had overcome my materialism Vervaeke's "Meaning Crisis" talks have interesting things to say about this sense of the world between modes of "having" (material) and "being" (existential). Fromm's point is we get mixed up. We try to satisfy our being needs within the having mode. We suffer from "Modal Confusion". Think about how much our culture is organized around this because it serves a lot of market interests if I can confuse you, if I can get you to try and pursue your being needs within the having mode. https://www.meaningcrisis.co/episode-7-aristotles-world-view-and-erich-fromm/ https://www.meaningcrisis.co/episode-7-aristotles-world-view...
GuB-42 1y ago
It hurts a lot more if you are unprepared. When you are at home, you expect to have running water, on a hike, you expect not to and plan around it. But there are things you expect while on a hike that are unlike your daily life at home. Things like your day job, traffic, pollution, etc... If you had to share your trail with diesel trucks and get regular calls from your boss, you would probably be upset, even if that's what you have every day at home.
dheera 1y ago
I used to do the one bag thing while travelling until I had more disposable income and could afford taxi rides, baggage fees and all of that. I used to own only things that I could move on my own and fit in a normal car, until I had more disposable income and hiring movers became a non-issue. I still try to maintain non-attachment to material things but I now welcome enjoying material things in a functional way. For example, I own a ton of kitchen gadgets and that allows me to make interesting food, but I'm not married sentimentally to any particular gadget. Things change, I guess.
- SwtCyber 1y ago
  Sometimes minimalism is a necessity, sometimes a choice and sometimes it's just not the hill you're climbing anymore
deleted 1y ago
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Ferret7446 1y ago
You couldn't survive with just a backpack if other people "overcame their materialism" and didn't own all of the capital that allowed you to survive, like providing you your equipment, food, knowledge, and emergency rescue if it came to it. Criticizing "hedonism" is its own kind of hedonism, or in common parlance, a first world problem. It is a luxury that cannot be indulged by poor societies.
- rhubarbtree 1y ago
  I travelled the world with a backpack. The good news is, it took me nearly 20 years before I started taking hot showers for granted again. It really did make me very grateful for a lot of things. But I’ve also had similar thoughts to you. I watch a lot of hiking videos of the PCT etc as one day I’d like to walk it. When I watch those videos, and when I see people on social media telling folks to “drop out of the system, be free.” I can’t help but wonder exactly who is going to prepare their dehydrated meal packs for them. Absolutely nothing wrong with taking such trips, made me a better and more grateful person, but it’s not an alternative lifestyle.
  - bloggie 1y ago
    This perspective reminds me that when people ask, oh you grow your own food and have food animals, it's like living off grid? their perspective is that farms get their input from the ground and sky, but this hasn't been true in centuries. there are many high-tech inputs for all types of modern farming, such as chemicals (even if they are organic chemicals), fuel, machinery, seeds, infrastructure, knowledge, financial instruments, and a market. in order to live off-grid, first you must invent the universe...
    - jacobr1 1y ago
      And need to acquire land
    - elevation 1y ago
      > in order to live off-grid, first you must invent the universe... Nobody is reinventing the universe, they just want a buffer. A buffer is a well made item that you can repair yourself, so you're not forced to purchase a replacement. A buffer is a shoebox with a lifetime supply of your favorite shaving razor. A buffer is a garden, a pantry of canned goods, a few hens to lay eggs for you. Each of these buffers insulates the bearer from the effects of supply chain disruption or even unemployment. Walmart could be out of eggs and razors -- but you'll be fine for quite some time, even if you didn't incubate your own chicks or make the razors by hand. > farms get their input from the ground and sky, but this hasn't been true in centuries Yes, industrial scales require industrial inputs, but a few hens will happily yield you a few eggs a day while living off your garden scraps and the insects they scratch up. And their waste returns nutrients to the soil -- a boone for a garden.
SwtCyber 1y ago
It's wild how fast we adapt to comfort, and how quickly the baseline shifts. One minute you're thrilled to drink creek water through a filter and sleep on rocks, and the next, not having running water feels like a personal apocalypse
shelled 1y ago
Did you really do one-bag? There are things I can't think of my days/weeks without. So for > In 2015 I got rid of everything I owned that didn’t fit in a laptop backpack There go my badminton rackets, cricket bat, and cycle. I couldn't care less about everything else :) (To be fair, the rackets may possibly fit into my Osprey 45L. Never tried.) On a more serious note: How much does health-care certainty factor into such travels? I am someone who doesn't have a family. So if a sudden death comes, I couldn't care less (I mean as of now - in advance), but I am perennially scared of falling sick and possibly needing care and hospitalisations, and when travelling (or without a base i.e one-bag kind of setup) and then there's at least the allergies, it becomes such a nightmare if you live in a country that doesn't have universal health care and is decidedly third world irrespective of the GDP. I am asking because when people blog about such plans and minimalism, the gory details of behind-the-curtain things are often left out, maybe not deliberately.
- delichon 1y ago
  Yes, this was a long distance hike, it isn't practical to carry multiple bags. The backpack also included tarp, sleeping bag, food, fuel, water, stove. Roughly 5 days between resupply stops. The supply stops are often quite remote, far away from healthcare, so you would rely on the kindness of strangers for transport.

hombre_fatal 1y ago

Yeah, when we stop moving, it's so easy to start hoarding. I lived in Mexico for 10 years with just two duffelbags of clothes and essentials. I could carry both on a plane unchecked and be anywhere with nothing left behind, and I loved it. Now I look around me in my apartment I share with my girlfriend and have things I wouldn't have even conceived of, like a gaming PC with two monitors (for what??) and a closet full of clothes as if I don't wear the same 5 things.

TimorousBestie 1y ago
> like a gaming PC with two monitors (for what??) There’s nothing like the pleasure of idling in a pointless MMO on one screen while half-watching youtube autoplay on the other. Alternate Monster with White Claw and you’ve got peak hedonism.
- riversflow 1y ago
  You missed the geekbar and the penjamim. For max effect also put on a twitch streamer in a different game, listen to imported pop music or edm, and idle in a discord. Oh and have a collection of fidget toys on your desk.
- Mr_Eri_Atlov 1y ago
  My ideal is 3 monitors One in the middle for a game One to the right for a video One to the left with systems stats and an RSS feed
- jimbokun 1y ago
  To each his own. This sounds terrible to me. Now bouncing between multiple Champions League games in the middle of an afternoon with easy access to good espresso…
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
LeifCarrotson 1y ago
I met a family who had just moved to Wisconson from Italy last week. The four of them (Mom, Dad, ~14yo son, and ~12yo daughter) packed everything they were going to bring with them into a backpack and two checked bags each. Incredible! What would you pick? I have a garage and a shed (OK, fine, it's a 24x36 barn) and a basement and a home office that barely contain the enormous quantity of my stuff at home. And yet I honestly think the highlight of this summer was waking up to the sunrise on one of the remotest parts of the Appalachian trail through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, with no possessions that wouldn't fit in a 22L ultralight backpack - including several of the same items as this guy's kit. On the one hand, most of the stuff is replaceable, "fungible" if you like, rather than sentimental. On the other, I keep it because I like to have certain capabilities, like cooking and auto repair and home building - I can't fit a tablesaw or pressure washer or food processor in a backpack; I've got a rack of 24 giant totes in the garage with painting supplies and plumbing supplies and bike parts and specialty auto repair tool cases and on and on that each occupy more volume than the one backpack this guy lives out of. I also recognize that this is a colossally inefficient way to allocate things among a group of people: I'm not going to pay a painter $1500 to do a crappy job to repaint my bathroom when I can do it myself with far greater quality for $100 in paint and a couple hundred bucks worth of tools in a giant tote, and neither are most of my neighbors, but this means that a sizeable fraction of people in the neighborhood live around our own personal totes of painting supplies. If I was going to pay someone else to build and repair and maintain and clean the house/apartment/condo/hotel that I live in (when I'm not in a tent, that's only about 5% of my time), and to take care of the cars and bikes that I ride in and on, and to cook the variety of food that I eat, and on and on, I would have a lot less stuff. If I bought tools to do these tasks that I would use once and then sell/give/throw them away...that would be unaffordable for me. One of the lessons that my Dad passed down to me is to never buy a thing unless you have the resources in time, price of consumables, tools, and space to clean it, maintain it, fix it, and store it - those are real costs beyond the sticker price of a new toy. Where does the money come from that allows one to sleep in hotels, ride in rental cars, travel in airports, and eat in restaurants for years on end?
- Arainach 1y ago
  >Where does the money come from that allows one to sleep in hotels, ride in rental cars, travel in airports, and eat in restaurants for years on end? If you keep your standards modest, the math isn't as bad as it intuitively seems. A $100 hotel per night is the equivalent of a $3000 mortgage/rent. And if you're living out of one bag you don't necessarily need that and probably have cheaper options like hostels (or tent camping) available. If you're working a software job or have worked such jobs long enough to have a few million in assets gathering interest, the cost of living isn't prohibitive.
exe34 1y ago
I have a load of crap I've accumulated over the years, but I try to regularly look at and consider everything, with the aim of simply imagining life without it. I'm reasonably confident that I could get rid of most of it without missing it much if I had to - but for now I'm still holding on to them in case they become useful again. It currently costs me less to keep them than to replace them in the future.
mr_toad 1y ago
You can’t even carry one duffel bag unchecked on a budget airline anymore, unless its a very small one. Some of the cheaper airlines even charge extra for overhead luggage.
- hombre_fatal 1y ago
  That might be true for domestic US flights, which I don't have experience with, but every airline between US and Mexico, or inside Mexico, has an option for 1x carry-on and 1x "personal item" where the personal item just needs to somewhat fit under the seat in front of you. This goes for Mexico's budget airline Viva Aerobus too.
tdeck 1y ago
I'm assuming you didn't cook much if at all during that time?
- hombre_fatal 1y ago
  I cooked. Everywhere I've lived had a pot, pan, cutting board, knife, etc. And I'm sure I bought some so-cheap-its-disposable kitchenware from time to time.
  - tdeck 1y ago
    Makes sense, I was thinking even a minimal kitchen setup is about a full duffel bag worth.

AaronAPU 1y ago

I think in general we fill whatever amount of space we have available. Nature abhors a vacuum.

bloomca 1y ago
I believe any free space we have will be taken unless you actively fight for it. And while it is hard to maintain free space, clearing up taken space is even harder -- the discussion is usually what to put instead of something.

Aurornis 1y ago

> My inner dialog is "this is unacceptable!" It turns out that climbing on the hedonic treadmill is practically effortless, but sliding down it is full of splinters. For me, in situations like this the frustration comes from having invested so much into something that isn’t delivering what it was supposed to. For example, when my 20 year old car broke down it was an inconvenience, but I could also shrug it off because I got my money’s worth out of the car long ago. If an expensive brand new car broke down I would be inconvenienced, but the situation would be much more frustrating because I spent so much on a new car to avoid these issues.

beaker52 1y ago

> 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. Same. Exactly the same. I have often reflected that I have never been as happy as when I had the least stuff, either. I often wonder if it’s a) correlation or causation and b) whether the stuff is caused by dissatisfaction or the dissatisfaction is caused by the stuff, or both. Either way, I’m currently undergoing an intentional downsizing in my life, toward minimalism. Not the kind where I use it as an excuse to buy (more) expensive minimalist gear either. I’m shedding hobbies and interests that I have because I believe that they’ve become distractions that I bury myself in. Replacing them is far from my mind, but prising them out of my fingers is a very real challenge. It’s hardly backpack living, but it’s definitely moving in that direction.

rockostrich 1y ago
As always, moderation is important for any normal person. I think that applies to minimalism as well. Use it to cut unnecessary stuff out of your life, but unless you're some outlier then it's probably not good to try and live the most minimalist life that you can without causing some terrible mental health effects along the way. > I’m shedding hobbies and interests that I have because I believe that they’ve become distractions that I bury myself in. Maybe you just haven't found the right hobby? Hobbies should feel rewarding, not like a distraction.
- beaker52 1y ago
  Of course. And perhaps? For me, the reward comes from the learning. (Who would have thought, being a software engineer by trade). Luckily my brain has a self-invalidating cache, but my home, not so much. Perhaps I will find the right hobby, but it should not be something that involves the accumulation of things, because the things weigh a hidden cost of possession. It’s this hidden cost that hurts, like a tax, an inefficiency of the mind, or being. It’s insidious because it’s almost impossible to attribute the friction with the possession, because you’re often not actively dealing with it, but it’s there. It’s like, you know you have 32gb of RAM, but for some reason you’re only working with 20gb but you can’t inspect what’s stealing the other 12gb. It’s only after removing things from disk, do you start to see the RAM getting freed up, and then you begin to appreciate the extra mental resources.

rockostrich 1y ago

> 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 a treadmill and there's nowhere to go. The live out of a backpack lifestyle is definitely a unique way to experience the modern world and I'm sure it's fulfilling for the author, but you can even tell in their post that life caught up with them somewhat and they needed to start staying in one place a little longer in order to maintain social relationships. Their linked post about walking every block of Manhattan and tracking all of their movement since 2015 feels like the exact opposite of a minimalist lifestyle and it seems to me like they live out of a backpack not out of some anti-materialism lifestyle, but instead just as a practical way to fuel this obsession with traveling and tracking. I admit, I've seen the author's Instagram story about walking 100k steps in a day in NYC and watched the whole thing because it's interesting, but I also take that and posts like this with a grain of salt. I'll happily take my horde of shit I need to get rid of in the garage over obsessing about how I can optimize tracking my every movement.

msluyter 1y ago
Perhaps the joke is that the valence of going backward or forward isn't equivalent. IIRC, some studies show that people will generally accept smaller gains to avoid the possibility of loss. Eg, loss has a greater (negative) emotional impact than equivalent (positive) gains.
- vacuity 1y ago
  > I don't think it's reasonable to compare the risk of suffering a large loss with the risk of missing out on a large gain. If your annual income is $N, missing out on a gain of $N is bad, but not nearly as bad a suffering a loss of $N. - A comment I saw elsewhere on HN today It's quite rational, in many cases, to consider loss of an object X worse than gain of X. A less rigorous example I like to use: it's far easier, and unequal, to kill a person than revive a person.

raffael_de 1y ago

Two months isn't really that long.

dolebirchwood 1y ago
Maybe, but as someone who's done a 4-month backpacking stint, I was over it after 1 month, so I think even just that amount of time is enough to make an impact psychologically. By month 3, I was acclimated to it, but still eager to be done with it. (As an aside, the experience actually made me less enthusiastic about nature and gave me a deeper appreciation of civilization. Never in my life did I have such deep gratitude for having a flat paved sidewalk to walk on.)
- delichon 1y ago
  After several weeks I got to a campsite that had a picnic table. It was such a pleasure to have a place to sit upright and prepare my dinner. I'll never take one for granted again. After getting used to doing everything on the ground a table and a bench are a luxury experience.
  - Damogran6 1y ago
    We're in a mode where we're 'camping' with a 5th wheel trailer. It has COMPLETELY altered my travelling experience in ways I never expected. Being in Nature, with a clean bathroom and warm shower and cold beer makes the experience amazing. More in line with this thread: Our house is full of stuff. It's a long story that ends up being: four adults living in the space that holds two comfortably. Having the trailer lets us spend time in a relatively uncluttered environment. IT's a reset that lets me not get quite so worked up about the time I spend not-camping. None of this is, in any way, cheap.

ortusdux 1y ago

we forget quickly we grow with our container we are all goldfish

jameslk 1y ago

Your IKEA Nesting Instinct kicked in. The things you own ended up owning you

dylan604 1y ago
Did we just get a visit from Tyler Durden?
- kridsdale3 1y ago
  Hey! We have the exact same briefcase.

carabiner 1y ago

I thru-hiked the PCT in 5 months 10 years ago. Same experience. I remember eating on the trail 2 bricks of instant ramen for dinner every day and being utterly content. It was the most raw form of living I've ever experienced.

65 1y ago

Maybe one good thing about the torture of living in NYC is you get used to the torture of living in NYC. My very small, very expensive apartment has had no running water throughout the work day for the past two weeks because of water main construction (which I get woken up to at 7am every day). There's a jerk chicken restaurant next door to my apartment that blasts music all day long outside. Roaches and mice and rats. Long crowded subway commutes. I do hate this life in various ways, but I guess it toughens you up and you get used to it.

yard2010 1y ago
This resonates deeply with my personal experience, why does everyone like this? Is this becoming magical at some stage?
- lmm 1y ago
  Earning good money is magical, and having so many services available within strolling distance (or at most a subway ride) is magical. Noisy neighbours, vermin, and unreliable water supplies are problems that should be fixed, but there are good reasons so many people choose to live in cities.
adastra22 1y ago
Or you could just move? Plenty of very nice cities without any of that.

jeremymaluf 1y ago

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adolph 1y ago

> I got comfortable with it and told myself that I had overcome my materialism Vervaeke's "Meaning Crisis" talks have interesting things to say about this sense of the world between modes of "having" (material) and "being" (existential). Fromm's point is we get mixed up. We try to satisfy our being needs within the having mode. We suffer from "Modal Confusion". Think about how much our culture is organized around this because it serves a lot of market interests if I can confuse you, if I can get you to try and pursue your being needs within the having mode. https://www.meaningcrisis.co/episode-7-aristotles-world-view-and-erich-fromm/ https://www.meaningcrisis.co/episode-7-aristotles-world-view...

GuB-42 1y ago

It hurts a lot more if you are unprepared. When you are at home, you expect to have running water, on a hike, you expect not to and plan around it. But there are things you expect while on a hike that are unlike your daily life at home. Things like your day job, traffic, pollution, etc... If you had to share your trail with diesel trucks and get regular calls from your boss, you would probably be upset, even if that's what you have every day at home.

dheera 1y ago

I used to do the one bag thing while travelling until I had more disposable income and could afford taxi rides, baggage fees and all of that. I used to own only things that I could move on my own and fit in a normal car, until I had more disposable income and hiring movers became a non-issue. I still try to maintain non-attachment to material things but I now welcome enjoying material things in a functional way. For example, I own a ton of kitchen gadgets and that allows me to make interesting food, but I'm not married sentimentally to any particular gadget. Things change, I guess.

SwtCyber 1y ago
Sometimes minimalism is a necessity, sometimes a choice and sometimes it's just not the hill you're climbing anymore

deleted 1y ago

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Ferret7446 1y ago

You couldn't survive with just a backpack if other people "overcame their materialism" and didn't own all of the capital that allowed you to survive, like providing you your equipment, food, knowledge, and emergency rescue if it came to it. Criticizing "hedonism" is its own kind of hedonism, or in common parlance, a first world problem. It is a luxury that cannot be indulged by poor societies.

rhubarbtree 1y ago
I travelled the world with a backpack. The good news is, it took me nearly 20 years before I started taking hot showers for granted again. It really did make me very grateful for a lot of things. But I’ve also had similar thoughts to you. I watch a lot of hiking videos of the PCT etc as one day I’d like to walk it. When I watch those videos, and when I see people on social media telling folks to “drop out of the system, be free.” I can’t help but wonder exactly who is going to prepare their dehydrated meal packs for them. Absolutely nothing wrong with taking such trips, made me a better and more grateful person, but it’s not an alternative lifestyle.
- bloggie 1y ago
  This perspective reminds me that when people ask, oh you grow your own food and have food animals, it's like living off grid? their perspective is that farms get their input from the ground and sky, but this hasn't been true in centuries. there are many high-tech inputs for all types of modern farming, such as chemicals (even if they are organic chemicals), fuel, machinery, seeds, infrastructure, knowledge, financial instruments, and a market. in order to live off-grid, first you must invent the universe...
  - jacobr1 1y ago
    And need to acquire land
  - elevation 1y ago
    > in order to live off-grid, first you must invent the universe... Nobody is reinventing the universe, they just want a buffer. A buffer is a well made item that you can repair yourself, so you're not forced to purchase a replacement. A buffer is a shoebox with a lifetime supply of your favorite shaving razor. A buffer is a garden, a pantry of canned goods, a few hens to lay eggs for you. Each of these buffers insulates the bearer from the effects of supply chain disruption or even unemployment. Walmart could be out of eggs and razors -- but you'll be fine for quite some time, even if you didn't incubate your own chicks or make the razors by hand. > farms get their input from the ground and sky, but this hasn't been true in centuries Yes, industrial scales require industrial inputs, but a few hens will happily yield you a few eggs a day while living off your garden scraps and the insects they scratch up. And their waste returns nutrients to the soil -- a boone for a garden.

SwtCyber 1y ago

It's wild how fast we adapt to comfort, and how quickly the baseline shifts. One minute you're thrilled to drink creek water through a filter and sleep on rocks, and the next, not having running water feels like a personal apocalypse

shelled 1y ago

Did you really do one-bag? There are things I can't think of my days/weeks without. So for > In 2015 I got rid of everything I owned that didn’t fit in a laptop backpack There go my badminton rackets, cricket bat, and cycle. I couldn't care less about everything else :) (To be fair, the rackets may possibly fit into my Osprey 45L. Never tried.) On a more serious note: How much does health-care certainty factor into such travels? I am someone who doesn't have a family. So if a sudden death comes, I couldn't care less (I mean as of now - in advance), but I am perennially scared of falling sick and possibly needing care and hospitalisations, and when travelling (or without a base i.e one-bag kind of setup) and then there's at least the allergies, it becomes such a nightmare if you live in a country that doesn't have universal health care and is decidedly third world irrespective of the GDP. I am asking because when people blog about such plans and minimalism, the gory details of behind-the-curtain things are often left out, maybe not deliberately.

delichon 1y ago
Yes, this was a long distance hike, it isn't practical to carry multiple bags. The backpack also included tarp, sleeping bag, food, fuel, water, stove. Roughly 5 days between resupply stops. The supply stops are often quite remote, far away from healthcare, so you would rely on the kindness of strangers for transport.