The Two Percent holiday gift guide
Gear Not Stuff: 22 items in 7 categories
Rejoice: This month’s Gear Not Stuff is a holiday gift guide.
Housekeeping:
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Audio/Podcast version
The post
Today’s post is the second annual Two Percent Gear Not Stuff holiday gift guide.
It features Gear, Not Stuff you can give to or request from others.
We’re featuring seven categories of gear: health, fitness, travel, nutrition, adventure, pets, and, naturally, requisite Two Percent gear mentions.
The rules:
Each item’s description must be brief-ish.
Each item must be something I’ve used or had recommended to me by someone I trust. No filler, all killer type stuff.
Items under $100 are highlighted with an asterisk.
The orange Get it text at the bottom of each item’s description links to the product.
Happy holidays. Let’s roll …
Requisite 2% Gear Mentions
A unique gift: Custom signed and inscribed copy of Scarcity Brain and/or The Comfort Crisis*
I’ll sign and write what you want in either book—the stranger, the better. (One woman had me draw a cat in her book … the results were disturbing.)
Price: We put both The Comfort Crisis and Scarcity Brain on holiday sale for $30
To represent: Two Percent Hat*
We offer three flavors of Two Percent headwear:
The Dad/Mom hat, which is perfectly suited for mowing lawns, wrangling kids, and staging violent coups against the HOA.
The black Have Fun Don’t Die Trucker, which has appeared on far too many podcasts.
The Camo Two Percent Trucker, for looking cool and getting lost outdoors.
Price: from $31
Health
To track movement: FitBit Inspire 3*
This activity tracker strips away the noisy metrics and gives you information that matters.
It captures steps and heart rate and has a 10-day battery life, so you’ll actually remember to wear it. Its price makes it a winner.
Price: $80
P.S., if you want something without a screen, check out the Oura Ring Gen 4.
To get back your time: ClearSpace*
ClearSpace is like Ozempic for screen time. This app helps you use habit-forming apps less and reclaim your time and attention. Here’s more about ClearSpace and why it works (hint: it interrupts the Scarcity Loop).
I’ve used it for the past year, and it’s helped me use Instagram and Twitter in a way that helps me rather than hurts me.
Price: $50 for a year or $6/month
To breathe cleaner air: Jaspr
Air quality greatly influences your overall health.
Some research suggests that indoor air is 10 times more polluted than outdoor air. We wall in and trap dander, cooking fumes, mold, allergens, etc, which impacts our health.
Most air purifiers don’t work all that well. Jaspr does. It’s an industrial-grade air purifier that’s quiet, sleek—and great for home. It captures 99.9% of particles in the air as small as 0.1 microns. Read more about Jaspr here.
Price: $1200
To find silence: Bose SC Quiet Comfort Noise Cancelling Headphones
Humans have increased the world’s loudness fourfold. All the noise we live in may be hurting our mental health and increasing our risk of heart disease (read chapter 13 of The Comfort Crisis to learn more).
Sometimes, I would like to sit in silence and read, but Leah would prefer to watch some heinous reality television show—the type filled with dangerously low-IQ humans screaming obscenities at each other. The chaos calms her.
Our compromise: Leah watches the show, and I put on these Bose noise-cancelling headphones and read. I fire on the White Noise app to completely drown out the housewife1 screams. It’s a fine way to find sonic freedom.
Also: Costco is selling these headphones for nearly half off until Christmas. Half off!
Price: $169 down from $319
To learn more about your health: Function Health
We recently covered the possible upsides and downsides of blood testing.
Here’s my take: Blood testing can be worthwhile so long as you understand the possible downsides and bring your results to a good doctor to help you analyze and put them in context based on how you want to approach your health.
I’ve tried several different blood testing companies and found Function to be the best. The communication is top-notch (you get text messages that guide you through every step of the process). The data delivery is clear. Plus, Function is often cheaper than insurance.
For example, their service was $250 less than my insurance for the same tests (which my doctor ordered). The results gave my doc some vital information that altered how we’ll approach my health long-term.
This link will let you bypass Function’s 400k-person waiting list.
P.S., If you want a good doctor to help you understand your results, this doctor is forward-thinking and does remote consultations. Mention that you came from Two Percent for blood work analysis.