Some notes on flashlight people
One of my favorite things about the internet is that rare moment when I stumble upon a community that has gone so deep down a rabbit hole of gentle overconsideration. This happens to me a few times a year, when I encounter, for example, a community about shaving, full of people who own 30 tubs of shaving cream and 8 razors apiece, who have their own internal language of shave directions and latherability. The shaving nerds must appear mildly insane to all oncomers in their personal lives, and yet they shave on, because who cares, truly. Nerding on this, exploring so deeply that you become an expert, and your expertise matters to really nobody but you, is a life well lived.
I thought about this recently when I found myself in the market for a portable flashlight. I found myself using the flashlight on my iPhone fairly often when I was going out, at shows and at night. Surely it must be easy to find a small flashlight that looks nice, throws a lot of light, operates on a single AA battery, and can clip to a bag easily.
And this, friend, is how I discovered flashlight people. Flashlights are a corner of everyday carry that I dimly knew existed, but had no idea as to their fervor. The main flashlight community on Reddit is over 145,000 people as of press time, and my god, the layers. Flashlight people make hapless LEDs do things that defy conventional optics. Flashlight people are writing their own firmware for flashlights. Flashlight people have firmware on their flashlights. Flashlight people use AA-sized batteries that are not actually AA batteries, but instead are these high-voltage, fast-drain monsters that can aggressively pile thousands of lumens into a mind-blinding beam, the color temperature of which is customizable within an inch of its life.
Owing to this, there is now a flashlight for every situation imaginable, from “the power went out in your house” to “you’re a certified electrician repairing a fuse box” to “you dropped a contact lens under your seat at the movies.” Name a use case, and a flashlight exists specifically for that use case, optimized beyond your comprehension. One imagines the contemporary flashlight person opening a sling, 8 flashlights of varying sizes Molle’d together in a row, a flashlight for every occasion, batteries charged & at the ready.