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Comment by Invictus0 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, it's a ridiculous take because the specialized things you have in a nice onebag setup are not going to be easy to find in a random store. Just replacing the backpack itself is going to be a major issue if you are outside of the United States.

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Exactly, which is what makes the mainstream approach very brittle and difficult to recover from failure. If even replacing the bag is a major project, then my vacation can easily be ruined. You say “nice onebag setup,” I say “white elephant that wants me to spend my whole trip focused on it.”

planning everything around rare failures seems silly to me. If an expensive item has good value, adds utility over a less expensive option, and can still be functionally replaced in case of rare failure mode, i don’t see any white elephant in that picture.

Other than contact lenses/glasses, I'm hard pressed to think of anything in my one bag setup that I couldn't replace easily should my bag be stolen or lost. Electronics (phone, usually the only thing I travel with), documents, and cash notwithstanding. Those would likely be on my person at all times so for them to be stolen would mean I'd have bigger problems than replacing my clothes and backpack (like having been mugged).

The only reason my setup is worth more than $200 (maybe $300) total is because of my glasses and contact lenses.

I take an iPhone and a laptop of course, but if you look at some of these one bag packing lists, they run into the thousands with every last sock being highly technical, boutique, and exorbitant.

there’s literally nothing brittle about a $15 dollar pair of merino socks though, which is the argument I was responding to. If you lose it you can still buy a cheap backup and still have socks, nobody is spending all their time and energy worrying about losing a pair of $15 socks. Some things really do provide more value for a higher price, but everyone’s utility curve is different for each item.

Mostly though i think it comes down to the old joke “everyone who spends more than me is wasting their money on exorbitant whatever and everyone who spends less than me is a cheapskate.”

Here’s the top rated packing list on the One Bag subreddit, which is pretty representative of what the community likes.

https://jeremymaluf.com/onebag/

The list looks like the very definition of brittle to me. Every single item is from a different manufacturer, possibly rare, bespoke, or hard to find (a Japanese version of a highly technical jacket, underwear that even says it’s hard to buy in the description). We’re way beyond preferring wool socks here.

I mean, if the objective would be to replace with exact 1-to-1 replacements, sure that's brittle. But someone listing "Levi's Jeans" may also be hard pressed to replace them with the exact brand when traveling in many countries (ignoring knockoffs and outside of major cities). If the objective were to replace the bag with good-enough locally available things, the listed items are all trivially substitutable for local items, outside the tech gear (which I'd consider a problem for anyone wanting to travel with expensive electronics regardless of their style, one bag or twenty bag).

Sure, that’s exactly my philosophy, to bring things that can be trivially substituted or replaced. The electronics are also trivially substituted, grab another black rectangle of glass off the shelf and have the cloud repopulate your profile.

Then we are in agreement, a list of mostly clothes is not a "brittle" set of items. They are all trivially replaceable.

Then I think we agree with each other, but the One Baggers would not agree with us since they are gear obsessive compulsives and we do not seem to be. At the risk of creating a straw man, I don't think that community would generally say their pack list is trivially replaceable.

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