Carrying Less, Accessing More

Over the last year or so, my relationship with travel technology has been quietly shifting. It started as a pretty straightforward "pack lighter" project, but it's turned into something more interesting; connected to how I think about stress, attention, and what I actually want technology to do for me as I get older.

For most of my career, I approached travel the way I'd approach infrastructure: plan for failure, build in redundancy, carry optionality. Extra chargers, backup batteries, multiple cables, laptop, tablet, two phones, adapters. I wasn't just packing gear; I was packing contingency. In enterprise IT, that instinct is a feature. In daily life, for someone with an anxiety disorder, it can become something else entirely: a very convincing way to let anxiety operate unchecked while calling it thoroughness.

The shift started when I stopped theorizing and started experimenting. Smaller bag. Fewer chargers. Leaving devices behind intentionally and seeing what actually broke. The answer, most of the time, was nothing.

I moved from a 20L structured tech backpack to an 18L lifestyle bag and got serious about what actually earned a spot in it. On paper, two liters sounds trivial. In practice the difference in size, weight, and profile is dramatic; one is built around gear, the other is built around a person. That exercise forced a useful distinction between three categories of gear: things I genuinely need, things specific to a particular trip, and things I carry because they make me feel prepared, which isn't the same thing at all. That last category turned out to be bigger than I expected.

The technical side of this has been straightforward to rationalize. I'm SVP of IT at a mid-size credit union. I've been doing infrastructure work since the mid-90s. I'm comfortable with SSH, remote desktops, cloud workflows, and self-hosted services. I run WireGuard across my homelab. I have AVD for Windows when I need it. The honest truth is that most of what I do on the road doesn't require local compute; it requires a good network connection and a device with a keyboard. My iPad Pro handles that well. I already knew this intellectually. The experiment was getting my gut to agree.

The less obvious piece has been the psychological side. I've been gravitating toward what I'd describe as ambient computing: tools that disappear into daily life rather than announce themselves. The Meta Ray-Bans and Viture XR glasses have been a bigger part of that than I expected, not because of what they can do, but because of what they stop me from doing. I reach for my phone less. I'm more present in physical spaces. The device becomes a layer over reality instead of a replacement for it.

That's a weird thing to say as someone who spent years maximizing visible, maximalist tech setups. But the aesthetic has genuinely shifted. I'm less interested in command-center energy and more interested in small, quiet, efficient systems that integrate without dominating.

The MacBook still travels, and that's not a failure of the experiment; it's the result of it. I game on trips. The iPad doesn't serve that use case well enough, and I'm not interested in degrading something I actually enjoy just to hit a device count. What changed is that I know exactly why it's in the bag. It's not insurance. It's not comfort weight. It has a specific job, and it does it well.

Everything else got interrogated the same way. Compact GaN charger instead of three separate bricks. Swapped a 26,000mAh power bank for a 10,000mAh one with a built-in retractable cable, because aircraft have power at the seats now and I was carrying capacity I never actually used. The Magic Mouse stays home because I never touched it on trips. Each of those cuts happened because I tested the assumption, not because I committed to minimalism as an identity.

To be clear, this isn't minimalism in the extreme sense. I'm not traveling with one cable and a positive attitude. There are still trips where more gear is the right call, and I bring it without guilt when the trip actually warrants it. What's changed is the default question. It used to be "what else should I bring?" Now it's "what will actually improve the experience?" That's a small reframe with a surprisingly large effect.

For someone whose career is built on redundancy planning and disaster recovery, and who has an anxiety disorder that's happy to weaponize that skillset, learning the difference between genuine preparedness and carrying the entire possibility space everywhere you go has been a more deliberate shift than it sounds. Therapy helped; CBT in particular is basically behavioral experimentation by design, and it turns out that skillset transfers pretty directly to interrogating why a power bank is in your bag. It required actually testing assumptions instead of just thinking about testing them, and being honest about what the gear was really doing.

The bag is lighter. More importantly, so is the mental overhead. That's the part that's actually stuck.