The List That Never Gets Shorter
Every rider has a list. Maybe it lives in your head. Maybe it’s a note on your phone titled something like “bike stuff” that you never let anyone else see. Either way, it never gets shorter. You cross one thing off and two more show up. New gloves. A better lock. That tail bag you keep seeing in your feed every time you open your phone. You tell yourself once you get through this round, you’ll finally be set.
You won’t be set. Nobody is set. Riders who have been at this for twenty years still have a list taped somewhere in their garage or floating around in their head. The difference is they’ve stopped pretending the list is ever going to end. They’ve made peace with it. You haven’t yet, and that’s fine, because nobody starts out at peace with it.
That’s worth sitting with for a second, because a lot of new riders treat the list like a finish line. Get the right jacket, the right boots, the right luggage setup, and you’ve arrived. You’re a real rider now. Except riding doesn’t work that way, and deep down, you probably already know that. The bike doesn’t check your gear tags before it lets you ride it well.
There’s a strange comfort in believing the list has an end point though. It gives you a reason to keep spending, keep researching, keep telling yourself you’re one purchase away from feeling like you actually belong on two wheels. That belief is exactly what keeps the list alive, round after round, purchase after purchase.
What You’re Actually Buying
Here’s the part nobody says out loud. Some of what you’re buying is for the ride. And some of it is for how you look showing up to the ride. Those are two different things, and mixing them up is where a lot of gear regret starts.
Gear for the ride solves an actual problem. Your hands get cold on early mornings, so you get better gloves. Your gear won’t fit under the seat anymore, so you get a bag that actually does the job. That’s not complicated. It’s a need meeting a solution, plain and simple, the same way you’d fix anything else that stopped working right.
Gear for how you look is a different animal entirely. It’s the jacket that matches the bike a little too perfectly. The patch covered vest before you’ve ridden anywhere worth a patch yet. The setup that photographs well parked outside a coffee shop on a Saturday morning. None of that is a crime. Riders have always cared about how they look on a bike, and that’s genuinely part of the fun of it. The problem shows up when you can’t tell the difference anymore between what you need and what you’re using to convince yourself, or everyone watching, that you belong here.
If you’re newer to this, that second kind of buying can sneak up on you fast. You see riders who’ve been at it for years, and their gear looks broken in and earned, comfortable in a way yours isn’t. Yours looks new because it is new. So you buy more, thinking more gear will close that gap between you and them. It won’t close anything. Time closes that gap. Gear just spends your money while you wait around for time to catch up.
The Gear That Earns Its Place
Ask any rider who’s been doing this a while and they’ll tell you the same thing, usually without you even having to push for it. The gear that actually matters isn’t the gear that looked good in the store under the lights. It’s the gear that’s failed you once and gotten fixed anyway, or the gear that’s been there for the ride that went sideways when you least expected it.
That old jacket with the scuffed elbow isn’t embarrassing. It’s proof. It did its job the one time it mattered, and that’s worth more than anything still hanging on a rack with the tag attached. The boots that are starting to break down at the ankle aren’t a sign you need new ones yet. They’re a sign the old ones finally fit your feet the way they were always supposed to, molded to you instead of the shelf they came off of.
This is the stuff nobody can sell you, no matter how good the shop or the salesperson is. You can’t buy broken in. You can’t buy a story. Every rider who looks like they’ve got it figured out has a closet full of gear that failed, got replaced, or earned its keep the hard way over time. That’s not a shortcut you somehow missed out on. That’s just time passing, and time only ever moves one direction, no matter how much you spend trying to speed it up.
When “Finished” Stops Being the Point
At some point, if you stick with this long enough, something shifts. You stop chasing the finished setup and you start noticing what you actually use week after week. The rain gear that’s ridden in real rain, not just sat folded in a bag. The gloves that have been through a whole summer of heat and sweat and still work fine. The bag that’s carried what you actually needed it to carry, not just what looked good on a shelf in the store.
That shift is quiet. Nobody announces it on a ride or posts about it online. You just wake up one day and realize you haven’t checked your gear list in a month, because you’ve been too busy riding to shop. That’s not you giving up on gear or losing interest in it. That’s you finally trusting what you’ve already got, which is a very different feeling than the one that used to send you looking for the next thing.
The riders who seem the most settled in this whole thing aren’t the ones with the most stuff packed into their garage. They’re the ones who stopped needing the setup to prove anything to anybody, including themselves. Their gear works. That’s the whole story, start to finish. It doesn’t need to photograph well. It doesn’t need to be new. It just needs to do the job, because they already know they belong out there, gear or no gear, list finished or not.
That’s the part that actually can’t be bought at any price, no matter how much you’re willing to spend chasing it. And it’s the part worth being honest with yourself about, because the list will always be there tempting you to believe one more purchase is the thing that finally makes it official.
Your Turn
Think about the last piece of gear you bought. Not the last thing you needed, the last thing you actually bought. Was it solving a real problem you had on the bike, or was it solving a feeling you had about how you looked, or how ready you seemed, standing next to other riders? You don’t have to answer that out loud, and you don’t have to post it anywhere. Just answer it honestly, to yourself, before you add the next thing to the list.
Ronnie Canty | The Squirrelly Biker
