Greetings! Per reader request, audio editions and video content are now available for those looking to engage more deeply. Support monthly via Patreon for audio newsletters, vids, and priority access during Q&A with guests. OG readers may recall patreon in the past with video demos. This piece is part of a series. Catch the previous in case you missed it. This time we dive into… EDC kits, or every day carry kits, litter the internet. Preppers, gear heads, and every little online community has its own idiosyncratic form of EDC. As I’m revamping my relationship with my phone, I’m providing a real example of what I carry around in my day-to-day life, from the lens of someone building a new relationship with his phone. No should-ing here. Decide for yourself what is best for you. If you want a deeper dive and demo of these objects, support via Patreon. Rather than committing to being perfect from the jump, this EDC kit will likely change over time and I intend to update it once a quarter. Onto the kit… Present outside the bag: tensor crown from Divine Life Creations. Backpack, and what’s in it
The phone stays at home by default. At present, I’m still with the iPhone 13 Pro Max, but use it significantly less. I’ve yet to find a dumb phone I like. The good news is that the dumb phone industry is maturing. Hack nobody mentions: instead, or in addition to jerry-rigging your device and praying that it doesn’t suck your soul, take it less places. There may be minor disturbances, but your relationship with the device will fundamentally change and it doesn’t take long. After much deliberation, wanting a phone for texts/calls only, I invested in a Jitterburg and was pumped, but wouldn’t recommend the device or company. Most everything promised on the sales call didn’t pan out, but damn that sales lady was great! My dream device is a blue-light-free dumb phone with physical qwerty keyboard. Minimal Phone is close, but comes with the pandoras box of an app store and that’s a dealbreaker. If I need a GPS, I take the phone and use it as GPS and leave it in the car. If I had a lovely dumb phone, I would’ve kept the dumb phone plus GPS. Sunbeam makes decent feature phones and I may get one. They have cleverly taken the same hardware and titrate the features up and down based on your needs. I really like that level of adaptability. Music is one of those features I’m tbd about. iPods didn’t text and call back in the day. Dumb phone with notifications and music is more distraction than I want. I have used the phone for music at the gym a few times. I had a particularly good workout using a nasal dilator and listening to this song on repeat. This prompted me to consider a music player. Elite Obsolete Electronics has some pretty solid iPods but I haven’t pulled the trigger yet. If you read those as recommendations, that’s quite a few, which brings us to the moral quandaries of recommending products. Where Recommending Gets Weird Worst case- peddling toxic crap you don’t use, and making a killing off it. I’ve heard execs at CPG brands have zero-plastic homes while putting plastics everywhere. Neutral- no recs, no connects. Best case- share what you use, with any appropriate context around the usage. However, providing in-depth usage context can be challenging. Even if you recommend something awesome that you personally use, this doesn’t account for the lifecycle of the company, like Traeger Grills getting mixed up with private equity and decreasing the quality of their steel after building a big brand. As a consumer, check the when of a recommendation. Brands are dynamic. Where things get weirderSay you’re Tony Robbins and you find a supplement that really helps your productivity and focus. Naturally, you want to share with others to help them. You have a few million to toss around, so not only do you recommend a supplement, you create a supplement company. Now, you sell supplements at your seminars. At that point it becomes tricky as a customer. If someone doesn’t get paid for a recommendation, you can hedge. If they do get paid, you have to wonder if they are recommending it because they are getting paid. One workaround is to see how long someone uses something, and how long they used it before recommending it, in addition to whether or not they get paid. Early readers may recall when this writing started, it was recommendation heavy. I have dealt with these quandaries before. Eventually, it got to a point where I felt that I was spending an ungodly amount of time trying out new widgets. Naturally I’m a person who tries many things, but this started to get weird and obsessive. The whole point was to solve my own issues, live better, and share how that was going with others. Trying things purely to create a content stream became weird and inauthentic. At some level, quality of life goes down when you pretend you’re sincerely trying eight million widgets when actually you happen to have a following and each rec fattens your wallet. I’ve done my best to remove any of that economic pressure from myself to keep your trust as a reader and to help me sleep at night. It has come with sacrifices but IMO they were worth it. However, the pendulum swung too far, and I’m sorry. What used to be once a week publishing like clockwork for years dwindled, and recently has come back. Support has been greater than I anticipated. A shamanic healer I work with poked at me to share more. One of my favorite writers told me, You seem pretty plugged into a lot of interesting “psychotechnology,” are you documenting this someplace? No. The answer was no. Let’s change that. Which brings us onto some good news… The Pod is back!!!Back in 2021 I had a podcast. It was cool. I loved it. It was also a shitload of work and stressful. Just keep going is not always the best advice. Sometimes stopping is good. Things can be resurrected. Podcasts suffer from wonkiness in their business models- generally, you start a show, and you monetize it by selling ads. In order to sell more ads, you need to get more eyeballs. In order to get more eyeballs, you need to get famous guests. So, there’s this giant economic pressure to engage in vanity. On top of that, podcasts often function conversationally as one to one, to many. A one on one convo blasts out to a larger audience later. There must be a better way! In beginning to document these psychotechnologies, I realized I already have plenty of ammo. Amazing friends, practitioners, and connections. These people have already massively changed my life and the lives of others, even if they don’t have two million followers on instagram thanks to good lighting and a BBL. I’m using my voice to shine a light on these people who’ve helped me. Win and help win, as Balaji Srinivasan says. The recommendation issue is already solved. All these are people I have already known for a while or actively worked with. If there’s a case that isn’t, it’ll be a conversation, not a recommendation. Tentatively planning for 30 episodes, once a week, 1st one tbd, but have already had some guest yes’s and the ball is in my court. Each episode will function like an event, with audience Q&A at the end. Patreon supporters will be given Q&A priority, so if you have a burning question for say, an acupuncturist, shamanic healer, tensor ring expert, or pilgrim from The Camino (all these guests are lined up), your questions go to top of the line. Hosting will likely be on crypto platforms thanks to ContentSafe since I was censored from YouTube already. Apparently “bridging the civility deficit” makes you public enemy No. 1. Stay tuned! ❤️⭐️😊, Drew Loving this and want to support? Share it with a friend, each one helps. 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