Cottage Stagnation and Recent Gems
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Also as you well know innovation can take many forms. There are innovations in manufacturing that could allow the same product to be produced for less. There could be innovation in customer service that comes up with new ways of ensuring that consumers are satisfied. From what I read on your business I would consider the way you send test packs out for fitting to be very innovative and likely increases consumer satisfaction. Finally, should a small business in this economy be focused on product innovation? Maybe, but being innovative in other areas could be the difference between success and failure.
At some point the innovation game becomes a sickness and is there for its own sake and not people.
I can't help but get the feeling that there is something intrinsically flawed with a way of seeing where "things" dominate how we talk to one another and form the subject of our relationships. We've set up our entire culture based on coming up with, marketing, selling, buying, and hopefully using, "things". When the outflow doesn't meet expectations, then we come down to squabbling over the scraps, as if they are the meat of what we should be basing our relationships on. In this thread alone there has been talk about the necessity to go simpler, indeed it seems to be the very essence of why so many of us have gone UL, and yet, we still keep going on and on about "things", unable to let go of them.
To truly get to that essential salt of paring away all redundancy and non-necessities, shouldn't we be looking to our attitudes, beyond the gear? Once we get the pack to the smallest common denominator, what remains is what is in our heads and hearts. Having your head crammed full of thoughts about gear is, too, a "luxury item" that gets in the way both of enjoying and fully engaging in being out there, and probably affects certain levels of safety in that you don't allow yourself to be as alert and conscious to your surroundings as you should be, especially when you are constantly using new gear that you have yet to get used to.
So much of what is happening in the world today, including the enormous economic downturn we are all facing, tells us that there is something wrong with the world, that even the natural world has been damaged and we cannot do anything about it. But the truth is, beyond our own perceptions of the culture of our own making, the world is still what it was before we came along, albeit not as healthy as it once was. If we would pare back our reliance on this money economy, on "things", that pervades every aspect of our lives… a state of being that did not exist before this kind of economy became the basis of our everyday survival… wouldn't that spare us more from the peaks and valleys of such a capricious beast as the market economy? I've always thought it was slightly insane that only we humans were going though these self-imposed freak-out sessions caused by things like economic turn-down and rise or loss of personal possessions, while right outside our windows, even during wars, trees continue to grow, birds continue to go about their usual daily lives, rivers flow, clouds sail by, mountains wait. And here we all are going bananas over slight innovations in gear! What does it take for us to get back to living lives as connected to each other and the living world around us?
Perhaps the next true "innovation" is fundamentally changing our way of seeing things and living within that new way of seeing our lives and possessions. Certainly that must the most basic motivation behind the huge worldwide reaction in the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street movements and such? I went through an enormous earthquake last year and then spent time volunteering in the tsunami zone, seeing, meeting, and talking with survivors who had literally lost everything, including every family having lost at least one member. I saw the complete annihilation of all the "things" that people had valued and worked so hard for. When picking through the ruins of their homes, nearly all of what I found and what the survivors chose to keep were things like photographs and diaries, little else. Whole families in the evacuation centers waited out the aftershocks with nothing but their blankets and a spare set of underwear, toiletry goods, perhaps their cell phones. What mattered was each other and their safety, the chance to continue being together. All that other stuff, miles and miles of it strewn over the landscape like so much debris, came to nothing.
Isn't it the same with our gear closets? And isn't nurturing our relationships here within this community more precious than any backpack or tent or rain jacket? Look, here we are together, sharing a love of the outdoors. Here, in this place, now, we've all found one another and interact daily. We get passionate about what we love here, not because of the gear, but because all of us have gathered here. Let's acknowledge the joy and preciousness of that, instead of finding faults and reasons to attack one another. Because if we lose hold of what brought us together and what keeps us together, this, too, can easily be swept away. A community needs work and a healthy respect for one another.
Devastation of Minami-Sanriku in Tohoku, Japan. You can see more at my blog. Seeing this and meeting the people changed my life and how I saw things.
Nick,
I give up on trying to wrap my head around this innovation/stagnation angst and agony; the fit is real uncomfortable, and it makes my head hurt.
As for Ryan's article, I went back and read it over again just to try and identify exactly what caused the eruption.
Seems (as it appears to me) that Ryan has his notions about what the experience of backpacking (and life even) means to him (perhaps in terms of function, durability, simplicity, and cost), and he let loose with his assessment of how the state of "gear" fits into satisfying his paradigm for the good life.
It's like he was standing in one room engaging in scream therapy, and a lot of folks in another room took his screaming as a personal affront, maybe because he was using terms, like innovation and stagnation, that can be open to different interpretions subject to personal experience.
If that's the case, it's sure too bad there's been so much heat when just a bit of clarity might eliminate a lot of confusion and angst born of blindness.
It would be interesting to hear Ryan's responses/reactions to themes that have been raised here over and over.
So thanks, Nick, for providing your definition of innovation, and illustrating it in concrete terms with examples from the past.
And I like your plan for the coming year: "So this decade will see me come back full circle and use my old gear, configure it to work well as to function and weight, and hike even more than I did in the past. Backpacking gear is just a means to an end, not the end unto itself."
I knew there was a good reason why I have hung onto my SVEA and Sigg Tourister, my Kelty frame pack, and my North Face Mountain tent —
It's should be all about where you are and what you are doing:
and not at all that you are doing with that Kelty pack and NF Mountain tent:
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