Interest over time seems to help refine things to ever greater specificity. A cave might have once been a great step forward for humans, but the supply was limited and locations even more so. Humans developed mobile homes in the form of tents, fixed-place homes made of wood and stone. In cold climates, they figured out insulation and heating. In hot climes, ways to keep cool while still sheltered. Humans have an amazing capacity to adapt their environment to their needs. In hot climates, the advent of air conditioning changed human desire to live in hot climates. At one time, houses had to be built to minimize heat buildup and air flow for hot locations, but thanks to electricity and AC, all you need are walls, windows, a roof, and electricity.
I find AC to be a fascinating problem. It does its job as intended, but the unseen costs strike me as great and getting more costly. One of those costs is people not utilizing the easy, low-cost, low-impact ways to deal with the heat. It’s like we’ve forgotten how to think.
Too much thinking
It’s good not to have to think about everything. Living off the land, for example, takes lots more physical work than it does living in a city or suburb. If you have to build and heat and cool and manage an abode, pump and clean all the water you need, dispose of all the waste you produce, as well as produce your own food and clothes, and diagnose and treat all your viruses, and illnesses, there might not be much time to ride a bike, let alone read an essential website, like this one.
There was a time when being a dedicated cyclist felt like being a pioneer. Gear wasn’t easy to come by. Knowledge was much harder. Creativity and research skills were assets. A story about a pro, an offhand remark by a more-experienced riding partner, a dramatic fail on the road led to thought, research, experimentation, possible solutions. You told your friends. They told you what they tried, what worked for them, what didn’t.
Dealing with the cold on the bike is an example. At one time, there was little in the way of cycling-specific cold-weather gear. So, cyclists would go to ski emporiums, hiking shops, army-navy stores, surf shops looking for answers. Heavy wool socks worked as shoe covers. Ragg wool gloves doubled as spring/fall wear. Alpine ski gloves worked on the sub-freezing days. Nordic ski base layers worked for winter cycling. Neoprene surfing gloves for wet and cold days.
One needed to know a bigger world just to ride. A big problem was this focus necessary for just staying on the road was time-consuming. A reminder that outdoors isn’t always as free as the saying goes.
Now, with the growth in cycling as well as improved communication technology and manufacturing processes, this kind of work to ride is hardly necessary, or at least vastly compressed. And the freed-up time can be used for any number of things, like either going deeper into cycling or having more time for other things in life.
No box
Having to think in the absence of a box is a skill that is worth having. Lots of technological steps forward, even seemingly big ones, haven’t netted much in terms of benefit. Like backup cameras in cars. Lots of people over-rely on them and don’t look over their shoulder or bother with mirrors and have lost the skill of using those tools. The result is a real, but small, overall safety improvement. Many mental skills are like muscles; use or lose. There’s also some signs that proponents of “user friendly design,” think some things have gotten so easy that they’ve removed people from any need to understand systems they use. It’s not like we’ll necessarily eventually turn into the blob humans of Wall-E, even with the AI hype currently promising something like it.
At the same time, this kind of seeking might be intrinsic to humanity. Just as engineered bike food is now available to cover caloric needs pre-ride, ride, and post-ride, there’s a portion of the riding population saying: ‘yeah but real food.’ And they eat Gummi Bears on rides, and fuel-up post ride with chocolate milk.
Still room
One of the places in my bike life I was still creating bespoke solutions was the drying rack for my bike clothes, both post-ride and post wash. I don’t have the exterior space for a clothes line (it also doesn’t work much of the year), and leaving a drying rack out is also not an option, so I’ve been improvising with hangers for years. Plastic hangers with extra hooks work great for air drying bib shorts, gloves, warmers, and more—you can even hang multiple items from a single hanger. Another great solution were two-level hangers that kids clothing sets came on, with an upper part for tops and hanging bibs and a lower level with built-in clothes pins for gloves or warmers. I had a system down.
Then I was given an octopus hanger. It has eight curved arms that fold down individually, each arm has two clothespins attached. It can hang almost everything. Purpose-built, it does the job for most of my bike clothes better than the system I had going. That it was purpose-built felt like a defeat. But it was a real improvement and addressed a specific need. Still, it was another thing in my life that was built exactly for what I was using it.
I was kind of down about it. Until I found out it was designed for infant clothes.