That's a question I had to ask myself a while back. I spent many years as a knife knut, keeping my knives sharp enough to field dry shave with only a minor razor burn, and spent way too much time obsessing over how sharp was my knife.
It finally took being retired with time on my hands to go fishing with the grandkids, walking in the woods with my better half of almost 40 years now, and many other things that I wanted to do. I didn't want to spend any more time sharpening a knife than I had to. I took to just putting a nice fast edge on my knives with an old boy scout carborunum stone that got my knife almost shaving sharp in a few minutes. It still gut and cleaned panfish, cut jute twine for the tomato plants out back, opened my mail and UPS boxes, and anything else I had to do. In fact, the nice toothy edge seemed to do a better job on slippery fish bellys than my polished, and obsessed over micro beveled edges.
I finally stopped obsessing over it, and I ended up enjoying my knives more, and actually sharpening less. I stopped worrying over how cutting this 'whatever' was going to mess up the carefully honed and stropped blade that I had worked so hard on to get hair whittling sharp. Now I just cut whatever I have to, knowing that if I dull up my knife, I can put it right in a few minutes on a small pocket Eze-lap hone or the old carborunum stone in the kitchen drawer.
I think like most hobby's that become obsessions, things get out of hand, and you sometimes have to take a step back and look it over. I thought back to my boy scout days, when we touched up our scout knives and 'official' Plumb hatchets on plain old gray carborundum stones and we did woodcrafts, merit badge work, and got by very well in our youthful ingnorance. Of course, this was the early 1950's, and the wonder gizmo's like sharpmakers and edge pro's were not invented yet. But somehow, against all odds, we had sharp knives. Hmmm. Something to think about.
