GOTTA GET THE GEAR!!!

It's tough to say whether excess consumption created the suburbs or was created by it. Those big houses gotta be filled up with something, and conversely, one needs a big house to hold all of ones stuff. But this much is true: this country has one fucked up addition to stuff.

The evermost passing fancy to begin a hobby leads the average American, even "in this economy", to splurge on every last bit of upper-midlevel gear one could conceivably use in the pursuit of this hobby. Even our character in Mass Effect, whose items are constantly approaching the limit of 150, gazes across this land with disgust. Pretty much every hobby worth doing can be started with a bare modicum of gear, with more items added later on an actual need basis. For many people, buying the gear is actually more fun and rewarding than its actual use; the ephemeral validation it provides is fleeting and needs to be constantly recreated. Well folks, there's a word for these types of people, and we got called it a lot in 8th grade for wearing lots of Mossimo shirts without actually skateboarding.

You definitely know, or perhaps are, the type of person we refer to. At the merest possibility of camping as an activity, the stock prices of Coleman's and The North Face shoot up in anticipation of the glorious binge of tents, sleeping bags, lamps, and windbreakers. After one weekend at the state park, in which everyone ended up actually renting a cabin, all that shit sits in their garage's stratosphere. Out of reach, out of mind.

This also may be a shocker, but to take up jogging as an activity one only really needs a good pair of shoes. But that doesn't stop all the "real job" holding motherfuckers we routinely pass on the Central Park loop from purchasing every type of sweat-wicking garment known to man to serve their biannual attempts at "getting back into shape". When that fails, they become 'triathletes', because then you get to buy three times the amount of shit that doesn't make you go faster.

Even activities with presumptive anti-materialist, body/mind/spirit/wellness ethos like yoga only become mainstream popular when $100 fleece pants hit the market. This pose is called "lighter wallet". Got a kitchen? Well, better fill up that counterspace with a KitchenAid mixer for all the cookies you'll never bake, preferably in a tone that matches your Italian-designed, chromed espresso maker that is too annoying to clean everytime (plus you have to go to tamp school already!!). And that Le Creuset set you picked up at Whole Foods is great for reheating old takeout.

We have to admit, we were trained to get the gear from an early age. After expressing an interest in learning guitar, it wasn't long before we walked out of the guitar store with everything the salesperson assured our mothers we needed: a capo, a metronome, an amp, a case, and worse yet an electroacoustic Ovation. Of course, all we really needed was a guitar without action so high it made our fingers feel like they were bleeding. But those were simpler, pre-internetized times in which information at our fingertips that could have preempted excessive gear buying didn't yet exist. It's easy to Googs some stuff, or ask questions on a message board to figure out what is really needed to get started. But all too often the internet is simply used as a resource to find more shit to compulsively collect.

Here's a tip: when you want to begin a hobby start with the secondhand bare minimum needed. You don't need the hardcover instruction book with large color pictures, you need a library card. Since you suck at it, pay yourself minimum wage and only get the gear slowly as you put in the hours in to justify it. You'll make more informed purchases, and have less stressed-out-factory-worker blood on your organic, fine-thread burlap smock you got with the art set sitting in your closet.