There's a strange asymmetry in what we're willing to call sensible.
Spend $400 on a Seiko 5 field watch, and nobody blinks. It reads as practical, even a little frugal in watch circles, the kind of purchase people quietly approve of. Spend that same $400, or a good deal more, on a folding knife and something shifts. Suddenly you're "that guy." The one who overthinks his EDC. The one who could have bought a $15 box cutter that does the same job.
Both objects perform a task most people rarely ask them to do. Both will outlast their owner if left alone. So why does one purchase feel restrained and the other feel indulgent?
I think it comes down to how visible the function actually is. A watch's job in 2026 isn't really to tell time. Your phone does that. A watch's job is to be worn, to be seen, signaling something about taste and intent every time you check it. Because the function is already symbolic, we don't measure the price against the function; we measure it against the symbol, and symbols are elastic. A $400 field watch and a $2,000 dive watch both just read as "a nice watch" to most people. The category has no hard ceiling because it was never really about the mechanism.
This might enrage some of the EDC people out there, but a knife is different. A knife's job is embarrassingly literal. It cuts a box, opens a bag of chips, and slices an apple at a campsite. The function is visible every time you use it, which means the price is measured directly against it, and the function doesn't scale much. A $70 blade opens the same box as a $500 one. So the moment you spend beyond what "opening a box" seems to require, the purchase reads as excess rather than taste. There's no symbolic buffer to absorb the extra cost. It's just you, alone, having spent more than the task demanded.
I own a Chris Reeve Umnumzaan and a CIVIVI Baby Banter, and I carry both in genuine rotation, not as a collector's flex. The Umnumzaan is Chris Reeve's "boss" model, a thicker, more aggressive evolution of the Sebenza with a harpoon blade and a lockbar built for hard use. One reviewer who ran his through drop tests and had a truck driven over it called it his one-and-done folder for years running.
The Baby Banter, designed by Ben Petersen and priced under $80, does close to everything the Umnumzaan does in a given week. It opens mail. It breaks down cardboard. It slices a mango on a tailgate. The steel is a notch below; the lockup isn't quite as hydraulic, but functionally, the two knives overlap by about 90%.
The other ten percent is where it gets interesting, because that ten percent isn't really about cutting.
It's tolerance. It's the distinct clank when the lockbar snaps home. It's knowing a small team in Idaho hand-fit that specific lockbar to that specific handle before it ever reached you. None of that shows up in a box-opening test. It shows up in the owning, not the using, which is exactly the same territory a $2,000 dive watch occupies over a $400 field watch. The extra money buys a relationship with the object rather than a capability the object didn't already have.
So why do we grant the watch a pass and interrogate the knife?
Partly it's cultural inheritance. Watches have centuries of being a legitimate luxury category, jewelry with a job attached. Knives carry a rougher lineage, tool-first, utilitarian, occasionally weighed down by the same stigma that makes people whisper-explain why they're carrying one at all. And partly it's what I'd call task-visibility bias. We forgive spending on objects whose job is ambiguous or ongoing, and we scrutinize spending on objects whose job is a single, checkable action. A watch is always "on," always doing its symbolic work passively. A knife only proves itself in the two seconds it's actually cutting something, and in every other second it just sits there looking like an indulgence.
None of this means the extra money is wasted. I'd argue it's closer to what people mean when they talk about buying things "properly." But it's worth being honest about what you're actually paying for once the function plateaus. The Umnumzaan doesn't cut better than the Banter, not in any way you'd notice at a campsite. It just carries better, in the way a well-built watch sits better on the wrist, even when a $50 quartz would keep perfect time just as well.
The real tell isn't the price tag on either object. It's which purchases we feel the need to justify out loud, and which ones we've quietly agreed require no explanation at all.
