Pants

I love this pair of pants, they are by far my favorite pants I’ve ever worn. If you know me, you’ve almost certainly seen me wear them. I was probably looking like a tree

I initially was going to say I don’t know how long I’ve owned them, but actually I can look that up. It looks like I’ve owned them since December 8th 2018. I guess this is a little over 4 years and coming up on 5.

What’s so great about these pants? Well, they fit right and I can do anything in them. They may not be perfect at everything, but knowing everything can be done in them is a treat. To be able to climb in the same pair of pants I use daily is incredible. But this alone doesn’t make the pants great.

Some of the reason they are so great to me is that they have made me question deeply what it means to own something of quality and if it’s important to repair something.

I’ve been repairing these pants for the last year or two as they have been thoroughly put through the paces climbing at Joshua Tree, Yosemite, Red Rock, Holcomb, and the likes. Chimney’s as it turn out really love to destroy pants. I’ve got holes in 3 pairs of pants now and continue to wear each pair.

Yet each time I repair them, I question myself, should I be buying a new pair of pants? And the answer is not straightforward. Trying to look at it from an ecological point of view on the surface seems so easy, repairing something must certainly be better for the environment. But to me it’s not clear if that is true. For me, maybe it is given I have owned a sewing machine for sometime. But if you are learning to sew for the purpose of repairing your gear it’s not clear to me that it is.

Having worked at a supply chain startup for a few months I learned that calculating the cost of a product’s environmental impact over it’s life is anything but simple. This practice is called Life Cycle Assessment (LCA).

Anyhow going into detail about LCA is not the point here. I don’t exactly know the point here, but what an odd feeling it is to have to question yourself and your own actions to take care of a piece of clothing that you’ve somehow developed a bond for over thousands of wears. And I will probably continue to wear these pants until they literally fall apart.