Disabled people are the original life hackers. We EDC (Everyday Carry) to survive. Join us to share the contents of your pockets and your bags. Share what you carry to cope, survive, and thrive.
The pocket dump is a genre with an active community online — videos, subreddits, Instagram grids, whole forums devoted to photographing the contents of your pockets and your bag and explaining why each thing is there. The genre has its conventions: a flat lay on a wooden surface, a careful arrangement of the items, a brief annotation explaining what everything does. EDC — everyday carry — is the organizing concept. What do you carry every day, and why?
For disabled and neurodivergent people, this question has a different texture. We don’t carry the things we carry because we read a gear review. We carry them because we learned, through experience, through meltdowns and shutdowns and pain episodes and cognitive failures and sensory overwhelm in fluorescent-lit spaces, that the alternative was worse. Our bag dumps are field notes from survival. Our pocket contents are a bodymind in material form.
We’re gathering for an Infodumplings show-and-tell: pocket dumps, bag dumps, and everyday carry. Bring your bag. Bring your sensory kit. Bring the weird thing you carry that nobody else understands but that has saved you more times than you can count. Share what your kit looks like. Ask what’s in someone else’s. Learn something new.
We’ll do a show-and-tell round, take a bodymind break, and open the room.
Come as you are. Bring everything that helps you be that.
Videos
Short primers on the pocket dump and EDC tradition — the culture before we add the Stimpunks frame.
What Is a Pocket Dump? The EDC Genre Explained
The EDC Pocket Dump Explained piece from Blueprint EDC gives you the vocabulary and the culture. What the community does. Why people share. How “everyday carry” became a practice and a philosophy and a very large corner of the internet.
Read before the session or skim during it — it’s short.
The Stimpunks Frame
Stimpunks is a neurodivergent- and disabled-led community built on a few bedrock beliefs. All of them are visible in your bag.
Disabled People Are the Original Life Hackers
The mainstream EDC and productivity communities sometimes talk about everyday carry as if it were a hobby — something you optimize for the aesthetics of it, the gear nerdery, the pleasure of a well-curated flat lay. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it isn’t our experience.
For disabled and neurodivergent people, EDC is not a hobby. It is a practice that emerged from necessity. We carry earplugs because without them a sudden noise can ruin a day. We carry stim tools because the alternative is stimming in ways that attract negative attention. We carry medications because missing a dose is not an inconvenience but a consequence. We carry index cards and checklists and pocket notebooks because our memory and executive function are distributed — not contained inside our skulls, but extended outward into the objects we keep on our persons.
We didn’t wait for the productivity industrial complex to teach us to externalize our cognition. We figured it out because we had to.
The bricolage frame fits here exactly. Lévi-Strauss: “the bricoleur works with available materials.” Our EDC is bricolage applied to the self. We don’t have the luxury of the pre-configured, factory-default bodymind. We kit ourselves out. We improvise from what’s available. We figure out, through long and sometimes costly experience, what combination of objects in our pockets makes it possible to be in the world.
That is not a deficiency. That is craft knowledge. And it is worth sharing.
First-Order Retrievable
From our Sensory Kit field guide, on the logic of where the kit lives and how it’s carried:
Anything I carry around this much can’t be on my back. It must be curated down to the things that are worth their mass and worn below the aching suspension of my pained back… Waist packs and slings worn front hit a sweet spot of retrievability, gravity budgeting, and pain management. I can bear the weight, and when I unzip the compartments, everything therein is first order retrievable.
First-order retrievable is the key phrase. Not buried. Not in the bottom of a backpack under three other things. Available at the moment you need it — which, for a sensory kit or a medication, is the moment you are already overwhelmed, already in pain, already struggling to think clearly. The coping tool that requires cognitive overhead to access is a coping tool that fails when it’s most needed.
This is why bag design matters. Why a belly bag is not a fashion choice. Why the Sensory Kit on a Clip exists. Why where you put things in your kit is a form of access design applied to your own body.
When you share your bag dump in this session, share not just what’s there but where it lives and why. The logic of placement is often the most interesting part.
Gear Is Less Important Than Skills. Skills Are Less Important Than Relationships.
Our Prepping glossary entry opens with a reframe of what prepping is and isn’t:
Prepping has a bad name, for good reason… Most of what is labeled prepping is this individualist mentality — what I call the bunker mentality. Instead, we’re going to talk about preparedness from a point of view that remembers we’re social creatures and that we’re part of a society.
And later: Gear is less important than skills. Skills are less important than relationships. All three matter and all three interrelate.
EDC done right is not the bunker mentality. The bunker mentality is hoarding survival gear against the collapse of society and the failure of everyone around you. EDC as we practice it is different: it is preparing yourself so that you are more able to be present, functional, and available — to yourself and to the people around you.
When you carry extra earplugs, you can offer a pair to someone who is overwhelmed. When you carry snacks and a fidget tool, you can share. When you carry a first aid kit, you can help. The Prepping frame reminds us: the goal of being prepared is that, by having your own shit together, you’re more able to help others. That is not individual optimization. That is mutual aid in material form, carried on your person.
The Cognitive Net in Your Pocket
The Cognitive Net piece is about how simple, low-tech interventions — checklists, index cards, the Ivy Lee method — extend cognition into the physical environment. The idea is not that we are deficient and need compensating tools. The idea is that all cognition is distributed, and some of us have learned to distribute it more deliberately.
The pocket notebook. The index card with today’s tasks. The bullet journal in the bag. The little laminated card with the “before leaving the house” checklist. The phone alarm that says “take meds.” These are not crutches. They are cognitive infrastructure — tools that extend our functional capacity into the physical world.
This connects to the Bullet Journaling, Junk Journaling, and Interstitial Journaling resource: analog systems for tracking, capturing, and externalizing thought. Many neurodivergent people find that physical writing — pen on paper, not screen — creates a different relationship to memory and intention. If you carry a journal or a notebook or a stack of index cards, we want to hear about your system.
The cognitive net you carry is part of your EDC. Bring it to the dump.
Join Us
Infodumplings happens every Thursday at 7PM Central, online via Discord. No preparation needed. No expertise required. Come as you are. Our EDC and pocket dump session is on Thursday, May 21.
You can participate by video, voice, text chat, or just by being in the room. All modes are welcome.
Cameras optional. Chat-only participation fully valid. Stims, movement, and fidget tools encouraged. No one will be called on. Silence is participation. If you want to share your bag, show it. If you’d rather describe it in text chat, do that. If you’d rather just listen to what everyone else carries, that is equally valid.
Join our community to get access, then find us in our online space. Our Infodumplings page describes what to expect.
How the Hour Goes
| Timestamp | Session |
|---|---|
| 0:00 | Welcome & Grounding — Brief framing: what EDC is, why we’re here, what a pocket dump looks like. No wrong way to be in this space. |
| 0:05 | Watch Together — A short video primer on the EDC/pocket dump genre. Screen-shared, no talking over it. |
| 0:15 | Opening Infodump Round — Anyone who wants to share what they already knew, felt, or carried — no filter, no order. What’s in your bag? What’s the weirdest thing you always have? Pure neurodivergent passion mode. |
| 0:30 | Bodymind Break — A few minutes to move, stim, stretch, breathe. Intentional and encouraged. |
| 0:35 | Facilitated Show & Tell — Guided tour of our collective kit: sensory items, cognitive tools, medications and management, comfort objects, the thing nobody expects. |
| 0:50 | Reflection Round — Optional soft prompt: What’s the one thing you carry that you’d be most lost without? Sharing welcome, silence equally welcome. |
| 0:57 | Close & Resources — Links, gratitude, gentle goodbye. |
Related Glossary Entries
Reflection Questions
On what your carry says about your bodymind
Your bag is a portrait of your needs. Every item in it is there because, at some point, you learned that you needed it — through a bad day, a meltdown, a moment of being caught without the thing that would have helped.
Think about the items you carry that other people around you don’t. The earplugs in your jacket pocket. The fidget in your waistband. The medication in the small compartment. The snack for the blood sugar drop you can feel coming from three hours away.
What does your kit tell you about what your bodymind actually needs — not what you’re supposed to need, not what productivity culture tells you to optimize for, but what you, specifically, in the body you actually have, require to move through the world?
When did you figure it out? How long did it take?
On first-order retrievability
The sensory kit that lives in the bottom of a backpack under a laptop and three chargers is not a sensory kit. It is a wish. The coping tool that requires you to search for it while you’re already in crisis is a coping tool that arrives too late.
First-order retrievable means: available at the moment of need, without cognitive overhead, without searching. This is an access design problem applied to your own body. You are the designer. The constraints are your specific pain points, your specific failure modes, your specific bodymind.
What have you moved, reorganized, transferred to a different pocket or pouch or clip, because placement matters? What is the hardest-won piece of kit organization you’ve arrived at?
What do you still haven’t solved — the thing you need that you still can’t figure out how to carry well?
On prepping as mutual aid readiness
The bunker mentality is: I have mine. The mutual aid mentality is: by having mine together, I can help with yours.
When you carry extra medication, an extra pair of earplugs, noise-canceling headphones someone else can borrow, a snack to share, a first aid kit, a phone charger — you are carrying mutual aid infrastructure on your body. Not in a dramatic way. In a quiet, practical, ready way.
The Prepping frame makes this explicit: gear is less important than skills, skills are less important than relationships, and the goal of individual preparedness is to be more able to help your community.
What do you carry that you’ve given to or shared with someone else? What do you carry with others explicitly in mind?
On the cognitive net you carry
Our brains are not islands. All human cognition is distributed — extended into tools, environments, relationships, external systems. Some of us have more practice at this than others, because we’ve needed to.
The pocket notebook. The index card with the three things you have to do today. The checklist you run before leaving the house. The alarm that says “take meds.” The laminated card in your wallet with the “if found” information.
These are not compensations for a broken mind. They are a cognitive net: a distributed system for extending memory, executive function, and attention across your body and your environment. The net is the system. Your brain is one node in it.
What is in your cognitive net? What do you carry to think with, not just to carry?
On show-and-tell as community knowledge-building
The pocket dump community online is enormous because people are genuinely curious about each other’s kits. Not in a voyeuristic way — in a practical one. What does that person know that I don’t? What have they figured out that I’m still muddling through? What item do they carry that I’ve never heard of but that I clearly need?
This is omnidirectional learning in one of its most direct forms: knowledge is in the room, distributed across everyone present, and the goal is to get it into circulation.
What have you learned from someone else’s kit? What have you started carrying because of a recommendation from a community member? What are you hoping to find out tonight that you don’t know yet?
Resources
- Sensory Kit — Stimpunks Foundation
- Sensory Kit on a Clip — Stimpunks Foundation
- Prepping — Stimpunks Foundation
- Cognitive Net: Checklists, Index Cards, Ivy Lee, and the Leverage of Simple Interventions — Stimpunks Foundation
- Bullet Journaling, Junk Journaling, Interstitial Journaling — Stimpunks Notion
- EDC Pocket Dump Explained — Blueprint EDC
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