Packing Light, Part 1: A First-World, Economy-Class Problem

After having traveled to several distant locales in the past couple years (and constantly scheming visits to more in the immediate future), I've gotten a number of questions about my philosophy of packing light. As a rule, I travel carry-on only, jamming everything I need for my trips into my trusty Osprey Fairview 40.

Both bigger and smaller than it looks.

As carry-on only travel has become more common in the US - mostly thanks to increasingly aggressive nickel-and-diming tactics by US airlines that make travelling with more a staggeringly costly affair - I've gotten fewer and fewer mind-bogglingly surprised reactions from people when I say I brought so little to, say, a weekend conference. I still, however, get expressions of confusion and awe when I mention that this bag also did me just fine for a nearly three-week hop-skip around South Korea. This is when the questions begin.

And for the most part, I love talking about this stuff. I am, as any who know me well are painfully aware, a bit of an organizational nerd. I bullet journal to optimize my time and keep track of my research; I compulsively organize and re-organize my apartment; and I currently have an alphabetized, custom-tagged Excel spreadsheet of every book, game, and miscellaneous piece of media I currently possess that I have not already consumed so I can, you know, get on that sometime soon... as soon as I'm done updating the spreadsheet...

Travel is in many ways the millennial organizational nerd's dream. Though the millennial mantra of "experiences, not things" makes travel a key commodity of my generation, travel is just that - an expensive commodity - and being thrifty with both time and money to maximize your experiences requires tremendous forethought. As I mentioned last year, easily half the fun of a trip for me is in planning it just because of all the organizational puzzles and problems there are to solve. Sharing that hard-won expertise with others is often just as much a joy - that kind of Poirot-monologue satisfaction of getting to show your work.

And yet...

And yet I've been really hesitant to write about packing light. Why? Because, fundamentally, packing light is a solution to a supremely first-world, economy-class problem - the problem of making your yearly vacation to some fantastical destination a little cheaper and more convenient. To have this particular problem, you have to have a very particular mix of a whole lot and not very much, and that underlying truth brings into these discussions a whole lot of political and economic context that I imagine most of the people who ask me for packing lists or pack-light tips are not super keen to wade into over the $5 cup of coffee we each bought without a thought as a pretense to chat.

So before I post anything about the gear I use, the rules I pack by, or why packing light can be the bee's knees, I wanted to write a little about this elephant in the room. For organization's sake - an organizational nerd is never off-duty! - I've divided this into a few "effects" that I see packing light as having or participating in, in no particular order.

The Lululemon Effect - Or, the Privilege of Buying Specialized Gear

Apparently, when it comes to doing yoga, Lululemon is more important than yoga mats.

Many of the key tenets of packing light are in the spirit of thriftiness: Bring only what you need. Simplify your wardrobe. Buy little to bring home with you. There are absolutely ways to practice these tenets whose only required initial investment is a mental one - an adjustment of attitude. And yet, as with most conscious shifts in way we live our lives, there are ways to practice packing light which can result in a massive amount of counter-productively wasteful purchasing of highly specialized products.

Obviously this is hugely relative - what's "worth it" for one person might be utterly frivolous and unnecessary for another. And yet the fact remains that in some people's practices, packing light is a very expensive hobby with potentially massive start-up costs - costs that beg the question of why you're bothering to pack light in the first place.

I'm calling this the Lululemon effect because I've seen (and been guilty of!) this most often in the arena of exercise. (Disclosure: I don't do yoga. I am so hideously uncoordinated as to make my doing yoga a danger to myself and others.) Some exercise hobbies absolutely require gear, whether by protocol (a gi at aikido) or for safety (helmets when biking). When you're newly committing to exercise in some way, though, it's easy for someone in a certain financial position to run out and buy way more and fancier gear than they really need. Bonus points if the dopamine rush from the responsibility and commitment you demonstrated by buying these things replaces the one you were going to get from actually doing them, and the gear either rarely or never gets used.

When it comes to packing light, part of this comes from the culture - one I can't really fault! - of digital nomads supporting their lifestyle through travel blogging. In addition to those folks (like me!) who are just sharing their research and expertise out of the goodness of their heart, there's a whole swathe of folks out there repping certain brands both out of the goodness of their heart... and as part of a complex set of digital business strategies that keep them financially afloat and untethered from particular locales. Searches for the best suitcase to use, or even just what gear is essential, bring up literally millions of hits - post after post of top tens and side-by-side comparisons that might convince you to pick up an entire new hi-tech travel wardrobe, or go in on several gallons of Dr. Bronner's all-purpose Pure-Castile soap (3.4 oz at a time, of course). Do you need it? Not necessarily. Does it make you feel like you're making a significant adjustment to your packing practice? Absolutely.

Again, I'm in many ways throwing these stones from a very brittle glass house. The travel backpack I endearingly name-dropped at the top of this post runs $160 retail (though I picked it up on sale for $120). I've dropped money on packing cubes, quick-dry, wrinkle-free travel clothing, and leakproof reusable Nalgenes for my toiletries. I tell myself these things were "worth it" for me in various ways - I've used them for basically every trip I've taken since I acquired them, wear the clothing in my everyday walkabout life, and am technically "saving" a lot with every use. But I recognize that putting out a guide to packing light which includes a bunch of pricey specialized items is, in many ways, somewhat discordant with the idea of packing light actually being thrifty in every sense of the word, and definitely a demonstration of a very particular middle-class position in society.

The Kondo Effect - Or, the Privilege of Minimalist Living

And I'm not talking about the unusual scattering mechanism of conductron electrons in a metal due to impurities.

One of the live-or-die rules of packing light is to be maximally prepared with a minimum of stuff. That means leaving behind a lot of things that you could absolutely see yourself desperately needing in certain types of unpredictable circumstances. The classic example is the hilariously clunky pair of rubber rainboots you can totally imagine yourself needing... if it rains. But what if it doesn't rain, and you've been lugging those big clunky boots around for no reason for [insert length of trip here]? Again, there's absolutely a sense of relativity at play - someone heading to southeast Asia during high monsoon season might absolutely medically need those boots, clunky or no. But in the philosophy of packing light, there is no worst-case-scenario worse than packing something and not using it.

The problem with these sorts of pronouncements - aside from the often weirdly gendered connotations of these hypothetical anecdotes of laughable paranoia and foresight, which invariably feature hysterical, fashion-obsessed women as the hapless packer - is that packing light can be a kind of recreational precarity that's a huge privilege to be able to willingly accept.

In a recent episode of Black-ish, the main cast - an upper-middle-class black suburban family - receives an invitation to go camping. Dre, the father, is flabbergasted at the idea, asking, "How comfortable must you be in your life for you to choose to be homeless for a night? For fun?" That's what I mean by "recreational precarity." It's a certain kind of privilege to not just willingly accept this precarity, but to find it fun to do so - something you're probably much likelier to do if you've never or rarely experienced very much non-recreational precarity like poverty or institutional racism.

I'm calling this the Kondo effect (and not the Camping effect) mostly because of the discourse that sprang up around minimalist living after Marie Kondo's Tidying Up went viral. Kondo's system does address some of the consumerist attitudes which create middle-class organizational maelstroms like those on her show - thanking items for their service when they're to be discarded, for example, does something to make our famously "throwaway" culture a little more self-aware. And yet there's a huge part of minimalist living which seems to depend on your ability to run out and buy whatever you need (and likely then immediately give it away or throw it out when it is no longer useful to you!) should your limited number of items leave you hanging with a problem to solve. Being a minimalist is also much easier if you're young, healthy, and have stuff like access to decent food and medical care to keep you that way - your life is much more predictable, and much fewer contingencies arise. In short, minimalism is made much easier by privilege, and it's perhaps little surprise that most "public" minimalists (YouTubers and bloggers) are young middle-class white folks.

This recreational precarity becomes a problem in packing light when the answer to any "but what if I need it?" query is "you can probably just buy it there!" At some point in my neverending voyage through the seas of packing light YouTube videos, I came across one that suggested not bringing any clothes with you, and instead buying a new, local wardrobe everywhere you go and discarding it when you move on to a new place. My mind boggled at the scale of wastefulness on display. While packing light is not impossible for folks with more contingencies and precarity baked into their lives, it is more difficult, and more difficult to enjoy, and we would do well to recognize the ways in which these systems are predicated on one's life being, on the whole, dependably fine.

The Airbnb Effect - Or, the Privilege of Gentrification

No quippy subtitle here - just people protesting against the imminent destruction of their community in Boston's Chinatown.

This last one is less an inherent problem of packing light itself, and more a problem with the knock-on effects of what it enables. Packing light is part of a system and a set of expectations that is enabling a certain kind of mid-range budget travel - one which arguably has some of the most devastating effects in the hospitality industry on local communities and economies.

Back in the olden days, for those incapable of forking out the arm, leg, and firstborn to stay in purpose-built "destination" hotels, the most consistent budget alternative was the humble hostel, home of the 24-bunk, plywood-bed dorm room and the locker-room-style shared shower. But then along came the sharing economy and with it sites like Airbnb, which would theoretically allow beleaguered middle-class folks looking to both save and make a buck to lend out their homes to other beleaguered middle-class folks looking to both save and make a buck while on vacation in order to effectively bankroll that vacation. This, at least, was the intent.

I hope it's no secret to anyone at this point that that is overwhelmingly (though not entirely!) not what happened. Instead, Airbnb has largely created myriad opportunities for certain professional corporate actors within the hospitality industry to create hyper-profitable listings with little of the very unprofitable regulation or oversight normal accommodations like hotels are subject to. The result has been the exponentially sped-up gentrification of many uber-popular tourist destinations and the emptying out of whole city boroughs and tiny towns which are being bought up expressly for Airbnb. The inevitable results are "ghost towns" where tourists cycle constantly in and out, precluding the formation or preservation of any sense of community, culture, or continuity. Add on top of that the fact that real estate moguls are playing highly unethical legal games to evict entire historic neighborhoods comprising people of a certain ethnicity - for example, Boston's Chinatown - in order to either bulldoze or exoticize all that history and "redevelop" those homes into more profitable temporary accommodations, and you have a recipe for what I recently encountered upon visiting Hawaii: people fighting fiercely for their ancestral homes and culture in the face of an insatiable march of gentrification (as of 2014, tourists outnumbered residents in Hawaii by 30 to 1) that isn't even trying to pretend at this point it isn't racist.

What guilt does the culture of packing light bear in this situation? I think there's a way in which packing light enables a certain kind of traveler (like me!) to reach destinations they wouldn't otherwise be able to afford, and to arrive there with a certain expectation that accommodation proportional to our level of investment will be available to us. That accommodation tends to look like Airbnb, which makes a lot of money off advertising itself as both a "budget" option and, ironically, a way to "live like the locals do" / "see the real [insert place name here]." 

For the third and final time, glass houses - I stayed in an Airbnb for the first time on my last trip, and I know a lot of academics who regularly use Airbnb to mitigate the out-of-pocket costs of attending far-flung conferences which our departmental dispensation will not cover. I can't really blame them, and I'm not about to stop traveling, or wait until I'm older and can (theoretically?) afford the upper-class version of these trips, because most of the earth will likely be fried or underwater by then (perhaps, ironically, in large part because of all these people like me taking long-haul plane trips to see it before it's gone). But it's worth keeping in mind the potential impact of taking vacations we can't afford to take more ethically because to be ethical is expensive. Maybe that extra $75 bag fee is one of those points of friction that might offer some necessary hurdles to our participation in this kind of system.

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All right, middle-class-guilt-ridden rant over. If y'all are still interested in my advice on packing light, I'm more than happy to give it - I may even post it here at some point (hence "Part 1"). I hope this didn't put you off it entirely, as there are ways of practicing packing light which mitigate or avoid some of these problems. But I hope that if you do take the plunge into packing light culture, you do so - as I try to - with a sense of self-awareness.