The Two Questions of EDC

Whether you’re out in the dry desert of Arizona or, in many people’s view the similar desolation of downtown New York you can find yourself in a crappy situation. What you have on you right then can sometimes mean the difference between easily getting out of that situation or just managing to make it back home. That’s why every day carry is important.

Over the last year or so I’ve looked over a lot of sites are dedicated to the idea of EDC and taken it from ‘the stuff you carry in your pockets every day’ to something a lot more advanced. Honestly, it’s pretty intimidating looking at what a lot of the guys on these blogs and forums carry around. I’ve seen posts where guys in my field carry, no joke, two handguns, at least three pocket knives, and a slew of other survivalist gear in addition to two laptops, a tablet and their IT toolkit (ITS Tactical has a satirical picture of this on one of their articles. You can tell it’s satirical only because of the hand grenade.).  Other posts have a bit more minimalistic approach, wallet, pocket knife, cell phone, and maybe an iPad mini.

Personally? After a year of looking at all the gadgets and stuff I started asking myself questions about what I was doing and what I wanted. I came up with two questions for everything I carry. Call it my every day carry test.

First question is, in no particular order or importance, “What do I need to carry?”

The second is, “What do I want to carry?”

Need does not trump want, even though it would seem that it does. If you need to carry something every day, there is no way to get around it. You have to carry it by default, so it is there regardless of desire. Depending on what that object is, how you carry it may be entirely up to you. For instance you may need to carry your house keys, but the only reason you carry them on a key ring is because you want to do so.  You may have never thought about other options, but they do exist, you just haven’t ever used them.

I’ve got a few articles in the tube about the stuff I’ve encountered over the last year and what I’ve ended up with. I hope you all like it.