Why I Stopped Carrying a Defensive Flashlight

Preparedness advice breaks down when context changes, and people refuse to update their assumptions.

For a long time, carrying a defensive handheld light made sense for me. Urban environments. Transitional spaces. Late hours. Crowd-adjacent movement. The tool matched the risk.

That’s no longer true.

My environment is rural now. My risks are environmental, not interpersonal. I use a flashlight every single night, often for extended periods, and that single reality forced a reassessment I see very few people make publicly.

Defensive lights and daily-use lights solve different problems.

One prioritizes momentary dominance.

The other prioritizes sustained work.

Trying to collapse those into a single “do-everything” tool usually results in compromise.

I didn’t abandon defensive lighting altogether. I changed where it lives in my system, and why it exists there. My daily carry evolved because my job, environment, and threat profile evolved.

If I moved back into working in dense urban environments tomorrow, the decision might change again. That is context awareness.

Preparedness is about understanding why you carry what you carry.