Indefinite Backpack Travel
Key topics
The article discusses the author's experience with indefinite backpack travel, packing lightly and efficiently, and the discussion revolves around the pros and cons of this lifestyle, including the environmental impact and the trade-offs between convenience and material possessions.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
17m
Peak period
66
96-108h
Avg / period
17.8
Based on 160 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Oct 2, 2025 at 1:12 PM EDT
3 months ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Oct 2, 2025 at 1:28 PM EDT
17m after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
66 comments in 96-108h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Oct 10, 2025 at 8:31 AM EDT
3 months ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
This is absolutely true, especially when traveling solo.
I’ve done this with various things I forgot, like a phone charger for the local outlet type.
https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/whatcanibring/...
https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/whatcanibring/...
- James Mattis
Note that crazy stuff like self defense absolutely, positively does not enter the equation. I mention that only because some people get weird about it in both directions, both "eek, you carry a weapon around?!", and "ooh, ever get to stab anyone?!" No. My primary self defense mechanism is good running shoes and decent stamina.
Always fun to lose your contact lens solution at a transit airport that doesn’t embrace “one stop security” and find yourself tracking some down on a Sunday. Fuck you Heathrow.
But I do have a Wallet Ninja that's useful that's only ever been questioned once, and never taken away. And I used to carry a small knife that folds into a key, and nobody ever noticed until one particularly bored TSA agent decided I couldn't take it with me. I should really order another one, or dozen, and treat them as "disposable" for traveling with.
https://www.swisstechtools.com/product/detail.html?id=111
You could bring the Swiss Army Jetsetter, but the problem with that is that you are almost certain to get stopped by US security every time, and deal with a 1-15 minute delay depending on how well the particular agent you get knows their rules around scissors and how many times they mistakenly call your item a Swiss Army "knife". To save yourself some trouble, just put it on an s-biner on the outside of your backpack, and ideally extend the tools so it is obvious there's no knife.
https://www.victorinox.com/en/Products/Swiss-Army-Knife%E2%8...
Of course, if you need to lug more (for special occasions or business), that's another matter, but it still makes my jaw drop when I see people travelling on vacations with massive roller luggage that often sucks on cobblestone streets or lugging up stairs.
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 research and ordering from the cheapest retailer. Moreover after you bought your first rain jacket, then what? Buy another next time it rains? If not, why not just buy it ahead of your trip and pack it?
That means constantly planning for every eventuality, which means always carrying an over-sized/over-stuffed piece of luggage. If you travel enough, you want to minimize that. Weight adds up, especially jeans and pants.
No, I don't always go and buy a rain jacket. Most of the time the forecasts are decent enough for most trips that I'll buy a cheap umbrella, wait it out, or something if things go sideways. But it did cause me to browse through some stores I'd never have bothered go into. For me, unexpected things can sometimes result in delights like that.
I saw a jacket that felt very nicely made, had nice materials, had a lot of high-quality seams (my wife's friend was a seamstress and taught us what to look for in quality clothing), and was a perfect fit and colour.
I'm far more willing to buy sweaters or other things that keep you warm, though.
Also, these things make great souvenirs. Every time I wear my merino wind buff, I think of that little Irish town on the Atlantic coast where I bought it, and how wet and windy it was.
Doesn't even need to be a suitcase, a big duffel bag can hold just as much clothing and be more convenient for carrying around, although you still need to check it at the airport.
Even better these days there are laundry sheets that are light / compact.
Ie I've recently spent 2 weeks in remote islands in Sulawesi, Indonesia and didn't bring enough mosquito spray. Well, on whole island chain I was in, nobody in tiny local shops ever had one. When asked, they told me they suck up malaria if caught and move on, sort of how we deal with flu. Luckily dengue wasn't there. So suck it up I did, luckily it seems I avoided it (knock on the wood).
With spray comes sunscreen. Some basic diving equipment. Non-tiny first aid kid. Some photography stuff. But yeah for that one I could still put it all into 1 medium backpack, just liquids travelled separately. For that Nepal, backpack was bigger. For Aconcagua, there was an extra big duffel bag. If doing full camping and cooking, one backpack but much bigger.
I'm going to steal their approach at rolling up clothes, though.
This way things have their place and you know where to find something specific.
You go from "loose rolls of clothes" to "solid bundles of fabric". Makes it so you can take in/out individual items rather than having everything randomly unrolling every time you try and pull something out.
(I hate all the weird color combinations and designs that a lot of companies use, but thankfully Smartwool has a good deaign with their Hike Classic Edition Ankle Socks)
I was under the impression I have to send them in and they are repaired. Nope. Probably my mistake to assume.
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.
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.
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.
Now bouncing between multiple Champions League games in the middle of an afternoon with easy access to good espresso…
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
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?
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.
If I had a few million in assets I'd be retired
You don't have to sit at home in retirement. You can go out and be involved in any number of communities - volunteer, join local government, go do fundraising for a cause you care about. The biggest difference there is that if you're not enjoying it you can just leave and not worry about how you're paying rent.
Can work for money or not, but if you are and your employer creates unacceptable or undesirable conditions you can immediately say Fuck You and just go do something else without worrying about covering the necessities of life.
It means you get to choose what to work on, instead of being forced to do work you don’t want to do to keep a roof over your head and food on the table.
Different people make different choices on how to spend their money. Some spend their money on cigarettes, or sports season tickets, or modifications to cars, or collections of things. Some give most of their spare money to their church or a charity. Some send money off to relatives. Some travel.
Hotels wherever you are probably aren't $100 a night.
If you have a mortgage below $1000 you have something that almost no one in a western nation will ever see again. Congratulations, but your anecdote is irrelevant to basically everyone.
The current 30 year fixed mortgage rate is about 6.3%. It should probably be higher. A $1000 payment would mean a loan for about $160000 - significantly less if property taxes and insurance are included in that mortgage payment. There are very few places in the world with a significant number of available jobs where most people can buy a house for that.
Let's look through the midwest and throw a dart at Akron, OH. You're within commuting distance of Cleveland, you've got a university and an airport, there are probably jobs.
Property taxes are 1.8%. Home insurance is hard to estimate but let's pretend $1500/yr. Average home sale price is around $137K. That puts you closer to $1200/mo, and most places are far worse.
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.
The $4 baseball cap isn't bad :) Darn Tough socks are also arguably also pretty cheap over a lifetime of use since the company mails you a free replacement pair if you wear one out
My apartment in Guadalajara was $200/mo.
so essentially no one in the entire world?
As for your final question, I was living in a cheap country. Rent was $200/mo with roommates. Taxis/Uber was cheap. Food was cheap. I made a modest wage in software.
This goes for Mexico's budget airline Viva Aerobus too.
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.
> 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.
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.
This may be a bit specific to me since I bought an older house and car in the past year and they require a bit more TLC. My partner and I painted all of the rooms (tools are just paint, brushes, and rollers). I've replaced almost all of the outlets and switches, including putting in a few zigbee switches (Sonoff ZBMINIR2s to be specific) since we have no overhead lights in any of our rooms and the switches don't control the right outlets... The only tools for that work are a screwdriver and a wire stripper. We also hung some cabinets in our living room and put up some bookshelves (made easier with power tools, but possible with hand tools). When it got warm, we did a bunch of work outside including some brick edging (bucket, mason line, and a trowel) and a fire pit (shovel, level, rake, and tamper).
Cars require some more tools but you can do pretty much every bit of maintenance work with a standard set of wrenches, a jack, and jack stands.
Everything just sits against the wall or in a toolbox in the garage. It's a big 2 car garage but it fits a home gym set-up, a TV on a cart, a workbench, a bunch of furniture that we need to get rid of on FB Marketplace, and there's still room to pull in a car (mine is in there right now since I'm changing the spark plugs).
I've been practicing this from a different perspective. It's not necessarily bad to have stuff or buy stuff, but you have to spend just as much time getting rid of things and evaluating their continued usefulness as you spend shopping and buying new things.
In tech terms, if you have a queue which you only ever add items to, well we all know what happens.
This second part of the process is overlooked, and particularly because our corporate overlords don't make any money from this careful consideration and management of our lives and the items within it. At least with my parents generation -- the boomers -- they went all in on purchasing with never getting rid of anything. Like a dragon and its hoard. Looking at craigslist estate sales is so crazy, because you see someone's lifetime of absolute junk they spent all their time accumulating, but obviously no time getting rid of anything. In fact, they just died and made it someone else's problem to deal with it.
I enjoy the outdoors but it’s also a great reminder of how much I love my dishwashing machine. Repairing it might take a few hours every few years, but it saves far more time on net.
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.
- 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.
People's intuitions aren't going to work right for situations that are impossible. I don't think you should use that example. (Or if you mean medical revival from the edge of death, then it's very difficult to visualize a "kill" that's actually an equal amount of damage.)
And things you own are fungible while people are not, which is itself enough to ruin the analogy.
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.
The lifestyle appealed to me too and I even worked towards it, but I don't think it could be a full time thing for someone who loves making things, "building a life" does in a sense require some permanency past your laptop.
Spoken by one who obviously has not fallen on a treadmill! Allow me to correct your misunderstanding:
Falling on a treadmill is almost precisely the same as being drunk and disorderly and falling while facing the door of a saloon: that is, as if two thugs had grabbed your arms and thrown you unceremoniously and bodily out the door legs first and face down. Meanwhile you are (unsuccessfully) struggling to right yourself for some unknown reason [it's like a reflex response].
Not a nice experience: it taught me to always use a treadmill that had the safety clip that stops the machine if you move too far.
As for the comparative experience (being thrown out of a bar by thugs), the less said, the better.
(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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think that's where we're headed, but I like imagining.
* https://promiseofjustice.org/news/louisianans-illegally-kept...
* https://www.corrections1.com/law-and-legislation/articles/re...
Maybe the number of sailors in deplorable conditions is equal to number of prisoners, worldwide. 0.2% of world population?
To me this vision of us being able to do whatever we want, while machines are available to take care of our necessities, to the extent we chose to rely on them, is almost heaven-like.
And for a prehistoric context, according to researchers such as James Suzman, earlier in human history, we were a lot closer to this ideal than we are now [0].
[0] https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/for-95-percent-of-human...
Or in other words, there were no automatic maintenance machines in the Star Trek universe at the time, it was all handwork still. Manufacturing and food prep was done by machines which solves some part of it I suppose.
Your future isn't realistic.
Just workers organization and democracy prevents it
It's like kink-shaming being someone's actual kink.
Criticizing "hedonism" is its own kind of hedonism because you are overindulging yourself in your own sense of pride and smugness for "being better than everyone else"
Not that the author of TFA is doing this, but claiming that you have overcome materialism while at the same time posting about it on instagram with your latest iphone, recording yourself on insta360 cameras, with your apple watch-recorded heart-rate superimposed on your videos is a bit silly.
> Criticizing "hedonism" is its own kind of hedonism
false dichotomy. Of course capitalism and our indulgence in material goods has gone too far. That does not mean we have to be totally pious in life.
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.
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.
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.
Vervaeke's "Meaning Crisis" talks have interesting things to say about this sense of the world between modes of "having" (material) and "being" (existential).
https://www.meaningcrisis.co/episode-7-aristotles-world-view...we grow with our container
we are all goldfish
As it is, you can theoretically run ios apps on Apple Silicon, but most app vendors disable that..
My main use case for an ipad while traveling is to watch downloaded movies on a plane. "AR" (not really) glasses like nreal air are way smaller and lighter than an ipad and makes watching movies on my phone pretty amazing..
Me personally? Nothing. I hate them. I never want anybody to touch my screen.
However, I've talked to at least one team that has disabled their app on MacOS who thinks having a UI designed for touch-screen run via a trackpad is too janky and would lead to a bad UX for their customers.
I've run their app via playcover, and it IS janky, but its a lot better than the weight of an iPad in my backpack.
https://3fulgear.com/product/freestanding-tent/taiji-2/
251 more comments available on Hacker News