Good atoms are as few atoms as possible

Add an atom to the pack and you’re increasing its weight. This is obvious and the essential tension. You want to add all of the atoms, give it all of the pockets, all padding everywhere, make it a cloud that hangs out on your body. You want to take all of the atoms away, make it less of a burden, easier to find stuff. There is a vast gradient. Where you sit upon that gradient is an opinion, one you may only loosely hold.

For many years, I owned a backpack that very much sat on the “more atoms good” side of things. I did this because my back sucks, of course it does, I work in the tech industry. More padding on the back is a good thing. The problem is that the backpack in question also took it on itself to add more atoms everywhere. The word “pocketing” arrives here in this moment. Zippers inside of zippers. I never used any of it.

But the organization!, they would say. Okay, fair. You get little pockets inside of big pockets. Backpack pockets almost never work the way you want them to work, especially when the’re embedded in larger pockets. It’s far more efficient to build pockets of your own – by throwing a bunch of small stuff sacks inside of a larger one, visually differentiating them in a way that makes sense to you, and organizing your pack that way.

It’s all optional!, they would add. It is, which is good, because as mentioned I never used any of it. But you can’t really remove a pocket. I guess you could trim away the fabric, but who even does that? Instead, I hauled a pound of zippers & pockets that I didn’t need all over the world.