A packer faces three obstacles. There’s contingency: a variety of possible futures must somehow be tamed. There’s consumerism: the junk you own needs to be winnowed into a useful curation. And there’s comfort: we want to be cushioned against transit’s sharp points. Staring down these monsters can be unpleasant. It’s embarrassing to realize that you live in uncertainty despite your hoard of objects, and to admit that you need your blanket. Maybe, if you were someone who could roll with the punches, and who lived a tougher, less acquisitive life, packing would be easier. So there’s actually a fourth obstacle: you.

What sort of person is good at packing? Joan Didion has a famous packing list, which she included in her book of essays “The White Album”: basically, two skirts, two shirts, one sweater, two pairs of shoes, stockings, some underwear, a robe, slippers, toiletries, a mohair throw, legal pads, files, a typewriter, some cigarettes, a bottle of bourbon, and her house key, all in two bags, one to check, one to carry. The list is often recirculated in articles about how to “pack like Joan Didion.” It’s the cool school of packing: the idea isn’t that we want to pack like Joan, but that, if we were sharp, sleek, and discerning, like her, we might also travel like her, as a kind of effortless bonus. For a while, I pursued this strategy. It always seemed to be working until, at the last minute, I’d add things to the bag. I lacked Joan’s confidence.

Eventually, I found a new role model: a guy named Tynan, whom I’d never met but whose blog I often visited. A “minimalist nomad,” Tynan did whatever he did for a living by working remotely, mostly from cruise ships, which he claimed were ideal work environments. (On one boat, he worked from “a perfect lounge in which a string quartet played for four hours each day.”) He seemed to live mostly out of a single small backpack, and to own only one of everything—one button-down, one T-shirt, one pair of pants, one down jacket, one rain shell. Most of his clothes were made out of durable materials that could be washed and dried overnight.

Tynan was nerdy, not cool—in other words, he was more on my wavelength. Through him, I discovered the world of “onebag” packing, a subculture centered on the pursuit of things like the tiniest possible battery charger, or the ideal multipurpose sweater. The promise of onebagging was that everything you needed for even the longest trip could fit into a backpack small enough to slide under the seat in front of you on the plane. Its most ardent practitioners posted after-action trip reports, in which they painstakingly reviewed every piece of packed gear, speculating about how it could be further miniaturized. A subreddit dedicated to “zerobagging” pushed the idea even further, with users trying “the no baggage challenge.” (A jacket with pockets was often key.)

It turned out that I enjoyed thinking of packing as a game, rather than as a chore. In the course of several years, during which I travelled often as a reporter, I put together a four-season “capsule wardrobe,” in which everything was made of either merino wool or technical fabric. I bought a single small backpack and assembled a system of packing cubes and little pouches for squaring everything away. I found smaller versions of my gadgets; standardized and streamlined my chargers and cables; set up a small travel toiletry kit, which I kept stocked even at home; and carefully wrote out detailed packing lists for winter, spring, summer, and fall. It was a consumerist endeavor, but it had an end point.