The Pocket Loadout, No. 1: What's Actually in My Pockets
The smallest kit I own is the one I use every day. Item by item — knife, light, wallet, watch — and why each earns its pocket.
I own a backpacking kit I’ve argued about for years, a fly fishing kit worth more than my first car, and a truck-camp kit that claims its own shelf. But the loadout I actually use every single day fits in two pockets and weighs about as much as a burrito with light toppings.
Nobody talks about pockets the way they talk about packs, and I think that’s backwards. Your pockets are the only kit that goes on every trip — including the trip to the hardware store, the trip to the trailhead, and the trip downstairs at 2 a.m. to find out what that noise was. So this is the first installment of a new series where I go through a loadout item by item, and I’m starting with the smallest one I’ve got: my pockets.
Here’s the whole thing. Five items, roughly seven ounces, no fluff.
The knife: it lives three lives
The Benchmade Mini Bugout is 1.5 ounces of knife, and it’s the single most-used piece of gear I own. Not most-loved — most-used. There’s a difference, and it took me years to notice it. The gear I love gets photographed. The gear I use opens Amazon boxes, cuts zip ties, slices an apple at a rest stop, and trims a frayed bootlace in a parking lot.
Here’s the part I’m actually proud of: this exact knife also lives in my backpacking loadout, my river day-trip kit, and the truck-camp bin. Same knife, four kits — one closet, every pursuit, working as designed. When I built the afternoon shakedown I realized I’d been keeping a dedicated “backpacking knife” that was heavier and worse than the one already in my jeans. The Mini Bugout retired it. That’s not minimalism as an aesthetic — that’s just noticing you own two answers to one question.
The light: the item I doubted longest
I resisted carrying a flashlight for years because my phone has one. What broke the resistance was an honest audit of every time I’d held the phone in my teeth to get light and two hands at once — and the realization that the count was embarrassing. The Nitecore TIP SE was the answer.
It’s about 0.9 ounces, it charges over USB-C like everything else in my life, and it clips onto my keys where I cannot forget it. The phone flashlight is fine until you need both hands, which — and I say this as a person who has needed both hands — is almost always. It also throws dramatically more light than a phone, which matters exactly twice a year and matters a lot both times.
The lesson I keep relearning: “my phone does that” is true right up until the moment it isn’t, and the moments it isn’t are never convenient ones.
The wallet: the category-ender
My The Ridge Wallet is 2.5 ounces of aluminum that holds the seven cards I actually use and physically cannot become the leather brick my old wallet was — there’s simply nowhere for the receipts and expired insurance cards to hide.
I had enough to say about this one that it got its own full review. The short version: it’s the rare piece of gear that changed a habit instead of just replacing an object. When your wallet has a hard capacity limit, you find out fast which cards were passengers.
The watch: the cheapest indestructible thing I own
The square G-Shock — the Casio G-Shock DW-5600 — is about 1.9 ounces of plastic that laughs at everything daily life does to it. It’s worn to yard work, errands, and the occasional wedding (with apologies to the wedding). It keeps time, it has an alarm, the battery lasts for years, and it costs less than a decent dinner out.
I own nicer watches. I never wear them. There’s something deeply relaxing about strapping on an object you genuinely cannot hurt. The G-Shock is the rare product where the marketing claim — indestructible — is just a plain description, and the price makes it almost suspicious.
The best gear isn’t the stuff you baby. It’s the stuff you forget to worry about.
The S-biner: the boring hero
Keys are the unsolved problem of every pocket, and the Nite Ize S-Biner is the closest thing I’ve found to an answer. One gate holds the keys, the other clips to a belt loop or pack strap, and the whole cluster stops being a jangling sea urchin in your pocket. It weighs basically nothing, costs basically nothing, and I notice its absence more than almost anything else on this list. That’s the highest compliment I can pay a piece of gear that costs less than a coffee.
The gateway drug
Add it up: knife, light, wallet, watch, S-biner and keys — right around seven ounces for the whole carry. And here’s my confession: I only know that number because the pocket loadout is where my ounce-counting habit started. Weighing your daily carry feels harmless. Six months later you’re weighing your tent stakes individually. Consider yourself warned.
The useful part is that the same four questions I ask in a pack shakedown apply perfectly to pockets:
- Have I actually used this in the last month?
- Does something else I’m already carrying do this job?
- What actually happens if I don’t have it?
- Is there a lighter or smaller version that works just as well?
Ask those four questions of your pockets and things get culled fast. The multitool I carried for a decade failed question two — the knife did 95 percent of its job. The backup battery failed question one. The second pen failed question three, on account of the first pen also failing question three.
The math is silly (in a good way)
Here’s the thing that makes EDC different from every other loadout I track: the trip count. A backpacking kit gets maybe twelve trips a year. Pockets get 365. Run any of the items above through that math and it goes absurd fast — the Mini Bugout wasn’t cheap for a small knife, but a couple of years of daily carry works out to pennies per deployment, and the G-Shock heads toward fractions of a cent. Compare that to a summit pack that costs the same and comes out four times a year, and the pocket loadout starts looking like the best gear money in the whole closet. If you like agonizing over value before you buy, the gear guides exist for exactly that — but the honest math says your daily carry deserves the agonizing most.
If you want to run this experiment on your own pockets, build an EDC loadout in the app — weigh what’s in there right now, then ask the four questions and watch the list shrink. I’d genuinely love to see what survives.
Next time in The Pocket Loadout: what changes when the pockets belong to a rain jacket, and why my winter carry gains exactly one item. See you out there — or at the hardware store, where I will be using the knife.