I have walked the Salkantay trek to Machu Picchu. I once walked 900 kilometres across India on my own, with no idea what I was doing and none of the equipment a sensible person would have brought.

But ask anyone who knows me whether I am an outdoorsy guy and they would safely say no. I love nature. I am also very much a day hike and back in town for a cold lager sort of bloke.

With that said, last weekend I went camping for one night in the Pyrenees, which is one of the joys of living in Spain. I rocked up badly prepared. So badly that I had to borrow a sleeping bag off the refugio.

It was an incredible weekend. Then I got home and spent what was left of it building a shopping list.

Tents first, which is reasonable enough. That became comparing ultralight shelters by packed weight, which became reading about Dyneema, which became a long detour into whether a down quilt beats a sleeping bag. By the evening I was on titanium cookware. I read a review of a head torch with a beam distance I cannot justify to anyone, including myself.

So either I have decided I want to be that outdoorsy guy.

Or I have been sucked into gear acquisition syndrome again.

In 1996 Walter Becker of Steely Dan wrote a piece for Guitar Player magazine called "G.A.S." — Guitar Acquisition Syndrome — after watching the Los Angeles scene buy instruments it did not need. He put it to readers straight: how many Strats do you need to be happy? It worked because everybody already knew the answer was one more.

The term escaped the guitar shop almost immediately. Drummers and producers had it too, and the G stopped meaning guitar and started meaning gear. DJs had it worst: a pair of Technics 1200s was never required to learn to beatmatch, but it was required to be a DJ. Different purchase entirely, and one everybody in the room can see you have made.

Now it is everywhere. Cyclists have a rule about it — the correct number of bikes is always n+1 — and a phrase for the ones who take it too far: all the gear and no idea. One survey of 1,400 American runners put the average annual spend at just under $1,000, on a sport that advertises itself as free.

The belief underneath all of it is the same, and it is very hard to shake: the next thing will make me better at this.

Here is my honest reasoning, and I suspect it is yours too. If I buy everything, I have no excuse. The tent is bought, so now I have to go. And if I am going, why not do it properly instead of half doing it with something that will irritate me on the second night.

That reasoning is not stupid. It is precommitment, one of the oldest tricks we have for making ourselves do hard things. The bike in the hallway is a reproach every time you walk past it. Buying is a promise to a future version of you who will be tired and looking for a way out, and who will find one unless you have made it expensive.

The trouble is the purchase does two jobs and only tells you about one of them.

The second job is that buying feels like starting. There is a decision, a checkout, a delivery date, and then something physically changes in the house. That is more evidence of progress than a first attempt at anything, where you are mostly cold and bad at it. People order worse food when a salad is merely on the menu, because considering the healthy option feels enough like doing it. A purchase is a better salad. It comes in a box.

I bought a De'Longhi Dedica a while back, a soft entry into espresso, and then for a week something new arrived every single day. The algorithm found Normcore, Normcore found me, and soon I was weighing up grinders that cost more than the machine.

The grinder may well have been the correct purchase. Serious coffee people would say so and they would be right. But that is not what I was doing. I had not got anywhere near the limits of the machine I already owned. I was buying the feeling of being a person who takes coffee seriously, and that was available in two days with free returns. Actually becoming one takes about a year of paying attention.

That is the trade in every one of these categories. The skill is slow and private. The identity is fast and public. One of them is for sale.

The brands winning here are not passively enjoying our weakness. They have built for it, and the architecture is worth stealing.

Start with the entry product, the most misunderstood object in any range. The Dedica is not a cheap machine for people who want cheap machines. It is a recruiting device. Its job is to be good enough that you fall for the thing, and specific enough that you eventually feel its ceiling. The ceiling is the feature. An entry product that completely satisfies you is a dead end. One that makes you curious is the top of a funnel that runs for a decade.

Then look at who owns the rest of the funnel. Breville bought the grinder company Baratza in 2020 and the Italian prosumer brand Lelit in 2022. De'Longhi took a 41% stake in La Marzocco, the badge every home barista eventually wants, in 2024, then widened the bottom of its own range again in 2025.

Read that as one customer journey rather than four press releases. The company selling you the first machine also owns the grinder you buy when you decide the machine was the problem, and the name you aspire to at the end. You do not escape the ladder by climbing it. You climb it inside a building somebody else owns, and they are redecorating the ground floor so new people keep walking in.

They can see you coming. People who learned on entry machines between 2020 and 2022 now know enough to want a proper group head, and the prosumer brands added price tiers to catch them. That upgrade was in the plan with a date on it.

The ladder leaks, though, and the leak is instructive. A well-kept prosumer machine holds most of its value, so every upgrade dumps a good one into the secondhand market, and more people now enter the category by buying somebody else's abandoned enthusiasm at a discount. Same with barely-ridden road bikes and tents used once. Build a category on identity purchases and you generate a huge supply of nearly-new equipment owned by people whose identity did not stick. That resale market is a competitor built out of your own customers' good intentions.

The second move is the sharpest, and almost nobody outside these categories copies it.

Every identity category hands beginners a metric. Base weight in hiking. Stack height and drop in running. Grams saved in cycling. Burr size in coffee. Within an hour of caring you have a number, you know whether yours is any good, and you know what a better one costs.

It is a magic trick. The metric converts an unanswerable question — am I any good at this, do I belong here — into an answerable one you can improve by shopping. Getting better at hiking takes years. Getting your base weight down takes a credit card and an afternoon, and the number is public.

Ultralight hikers built a tool called LighterPack so a gear list could live at a shareable link, and the kit list promptly became a thing you post and strangers reply to. The identity is fully on display before anyone has walked anywhere.

The third move is that the best of these brands stopped selling equipment and started selling the room you get to stand in.

Strava's 2026 community report has running clubs up 3.5 times year on year, with a million clubs on the platform. Bandit came out of the New York run club scene in 2020 and hired its head of community from Tracksmith and Brooklyn Track Club, treating community as a track of its own rather than a line item. A competitor put it more honestly than most agencies manage in a deck: plenty of brands say community, but people wearing Bandit feel like they are part of something.

Tracksmith shorts run $85 to $110 and jackets go to $350. That is not a price for fabric. It is a cover charge. The room behind it is real, and that is why it is worth paying. Eighteen months of unglamorous mileage would also get you into that room. The shorts take four days including delivery.

So here is the part worth stealing: work out who your customer is trying to become, not what they are trying to buy, then sell them day one of being that person at every price point you can build.

Diderot bought a beautiful dressing gown in 1769, found his desk looked shabby beside it, replaced most of the room, and wrote a very grumpy essay about it. That spiral took him months and required leaving the house.

Mine took a Sunday. The gap between wanting an identity and displaying it has closed to about the length of a delivery window. The gap between displaying it and earning it has not moved a day. Every brand in these categories lives in the distance between the two, and it keeps getting wider.

We run the same play at work with better vocabulary. The plugin subscription bought at midnight after seeing someone else's portfolio. The AI tool paid annually in January, opened four times by March. The unread strategy books on the shelf are a base weight, a spec sheet for a version of yourself you have not put the hours into yet.

None of which makes it useless. Money spent does get people out the door, and the club singlet puts you among people who notice when you stop turning up. I would rather have the instinct than not.

But I had the best weekend I have had in a year in a sleeping bag I borrowed off a refugio, and I have since spent more hours reading about tents than I have spent inside one.