I used to have Bag Glee, every bit as much as Phone Glee or Car Glee or Shoe Glee. I don’t know when exactly it began – probably when I got my first laptop in 1999, if I had to guess – but for years I was constantly trying to find the perfect bag for everything, whether backpack or Kensington Saddlebag or some weird hip-slung thing or whatever Timbuk2 had come out with. My very first post on this very blog – almost thirteen years ago – mentioned my chagrin at their discontinuing the Ace pack. And once I got into a mode of carrying one laptop back and forth every day – which was the case for seven or eight years – I was constantly fixated on what would best handle my loadout, and what that loadout would consist of.
As it happens, about five years ago I settled on a very minimal Timbuk2 black backpack, enough to hold the computer and not much else. Because I genuinely can’t remember the last time I traveled with a laptop other than for work. Maybe 2010, during the netbook experiment – but even once I had an iPad, it rarely left the house. Not that we did all that much traveling in the first few years of my iPad experience, but even then, my goal was to get to the iPad mini and fit it in a coat rather than a bag.
Because really, in the smartphone age, the goal is to have a phone do everything. Worst case scenario, you add a Kindle for reading and a battery pack to recharge everything and fit it all in the right jacket, which can be most anything these days. The iPhone X has meant that I don’t even bother with the Kindle, and so anything will work: linen blazer, Uniqlo blouson, Harris Tweed, Filson trucker jacket, Rickson bomber, pea coat, rain shell, zippered sweatshirt.
I still have my Rickshaw messenger, and my slightly larger custom Timbuk2 messenger, and they generally do for a carry-on (the Timbuk2 will even do for a weekend getaway bag, especially if no flights are involved) but I haven’t gone looking for new bags in a long time. The closest thing I’ve been tempted by at this point is a duffel bag, something to substitute for a suitcase going abroad at an age when I don’t have to schlep my life around on my back like an impoverished student on a EurRail pass.
But more and more aging backpacks and laptop sleeves and the like are finding their way from the garage or the closet to Goodwill these days. Which is just as well. There are things that are surplus to requirement with no sentimental value or prospect of future utility, and those are the things to get off your hands as quickly as circumstances allow.