You Don't Need That Many Knives

I mentioned the idea a while back that "you don't need that many knives."

I wanted to elaborate a bit...

The underlying theory of the everyday carry discipline, at least as far as I can manage to define it, is the belief that having a selection of tools on one's person is more beneficial than not.  The ability to solve a variety of problems with the things in your pockets being the primary rationale.  Naturally, it is impossible, or at least impractical, to carry tools to solve every problem that might arise.  As such, tools which have a broad usefulness are often selected over those of a more specific purpose.  For this reason, we often see knives, multi-tools, flashlights, pen and paper, and other such things of exceptionally broad utility.  These items can be employed in a wide variety of ways to solve a wide variety of problems.

Importantly, an EDC kit also reflects the problems one believes may be encountered on any given day.  It is in that individual thread that we see a variety of items of specific utility; a bicycle commuter may carry a patch kit, a photographer may have a lens pen, someone with severe allergies would carry an EpiPen, and so on and so forth.

That said, one of the most prevalent items found in everyday carry kits is a knife.  Manifest in many different forms, ranging from keychain sized Swiss Army Knives to fixed blades with everything in between, knives play an incredibly important part in the EDC discipline.

Taking my data merely from the variety of pocket dump posts in various corners of the internet, I have come to the conclusion, as previously mentioned, that there are some people who carry too many knives absent a discernible purpose.  They have taken "two is one and one is none" to an unrecognizable extreme.  Multiple full-size folders in the same pair of pants as a Swiss Army Knife and a multi-tool.  It's absurd!

Why?  Diminishing return.  A concept suggesting that with each additional unit the utility derived from that unit diminishes; additionally, the utility of all units decreases.  Applied here, the utility of a knife is high.  That single blade can be used for a great number of things to solve a great number of problems.  A second blade is not as useful as the first.  Now the two knives are both slightly less useful.  One will be used, at most, 50% of the time.  The same follows for all subsequent knives; they each become slightly more useless as additional knives are carried.

Furthermore, minimalism is paramount.  Too many are infected by the disease of too much stuff.  Yes, gear is cool but bulky pockets are not.

In most instances carrying more than one knife is simply unnecessary.