My Everyday Carry

submitted by bauer

Perhaps I am not “operating” in the same reality as the people posting on this site and I certainly am not trying to judge anyone’s lifestyle.  I’m very much about freedom to do what you like, especially when its as harmless as the displaying of one’s kit.  -but I am interested from an academic perspective on your thoughts of marketer’s cultivation of grown men as boyish consumers.  My gut feeling is that a large percentage of “Everyday Carry” items never see useful operation but are merely for display.  When I was a boy I thumbed through the back of comics and kung fu magazines to catch a glimspe of all the gouge that could be purchased but never had the means.  As an adult I finally have the cash to get all those things but still don’t have the enemies, foreign or domestic, to vanquish.  Imagined risk without accompanying horrors.  Call of Duty without the actual duty.  Red Dawn from a comfy bed.  It is a marketer’s dream.  I could be wrong.  Perhaps my workaday existence is the outlier and the norm is a chaotic dangerous existence rendered tame with tactical flashlights and titanium sporks.  I conclude that, in my perhaps unwelcome and certainly irrelevant opinion, this is another manifestation of our hyper consumptive state of affairs.  However, in the spirit of it all, I will offer that I do get a lot of use out of these Red Wing steel toe oxfords.  Thoughts?

Editor’s Note:  I might be feeding the trolls here, but do you honestly think that such a large community has no justification for purchasing and carrying gear other than to take pictures of them to post on the internet? Haha, come on, this isn’t a fashion blog or something like that! But really — it seems you are challenging the definition of tools here, that they have no utility… I have purchased lots of gear before that just simply didn’t work out for me. Did I continue to carry them for display? No, that wouldn’t make any sense. I stopped carrying them precisely because EDCers generally don’t carry extraneous things for no reason. I do concede that some items are a bit costlier than they need to be, but the bottom line is that they still fulfill some purpose. You might just think they’re “for display” because some gear looks damn good… However, I have no doubt that the majority of the contributors to this site (besides the trolls) use their gear in some capacity or another. 

Oh, and I wear Red Wings too.