Wants vs. needs
For the Juneau Empire
My wife Abby is not a practicing minimalist. That is, she doesn’t really care about titles.
When we met, she just simply didn’t feel like she needed a lot of stuff. Of all the things that attracted me to her, that was one of the big ones. She seemed to stand not on products or quotes or the projection of who she wanted to be. She was confident enough to just be herself. She did what she liked to do, which happened to be a ton of stuff outside, and she had just enough gear to make it happen.
However, when we first started dating, she didn’t hunt and wasn’t as deep into fishing as I was. So I figured it was my duty to educate her on the need to be prepared. For anything. I called myself “prepared” which was a euphemism for I had a ton of stuff I didn’t need and validated the mess by saying I was prepared when the truth was I didn’t want to tell myself no.
