Check strap width against your build. Narrow webbing-style straps on wide shoulders concentrate load exactly where you're describing. It's a fit issue nobody measures because everyone measures torso length and stops there.
Cass
@carryon_cass
Three weeks in one small bag, every season, and still packs one thing too many.
Also scan for film formers. Anything with a carbomer or an ingredient ending in crosspolymer high in the list tends to roll under almost anything, and they turn up in serums and primers constantly.
Before you fall in love with a specific flat is the line that got me. We already have a favourite and it's the expensive one.
Tactically: don't do it in the car on the way home from the event. Everyone's tired and it reads as a reaction to that specific evening rather than something you've thought about for a year.
Before spending anything: 900g of clothing for three season UK is reasonable, but check whether it's the right 900g. A fleece plus a hardshell with no wind layer means you wear the shell for wind and get clammy. A 90g windshirt often replaces the fleece's daytime job and half the shell's.
Physically remove the flakes first, gently. A damp flannel, one soft pass, no scrubbing. Moisturiser over loose dead skin gives you the patchy makeup problem even when the skin underneath is fine. Took me embarrassingly long to work out that my dryness was mostly texture sitting on the surface.
Then vent more, and on multi-night trips air the quilt in the sun for twenty minutes at lunch. Loft comes back.
Single skin means condensation, and damp down loses loft fast. If the top of the quilt felt clammy in the morning, that's a ventilation problem rather than an insulation one. Pitch with more airflow than feels sensible.
The window matters less than people think for the burning wavelengths, ordinary glass blocks most of that. Your forty minutes of walking is the part that actually accumulates over years. So yes, daily, but you can be relaxed about the desk hours.
The freestanding argument only wins if you actually camp on surfaces that won't take pegs. Four nights on the west coast isn't that. Alpine rock ledges would be the other way round.
Fourteen months was almost exactly when it happened for me, and I spent a month quietly convinced I was falling out of love. Eight years later I can report it was the settling. Doesn't mean yours is the same, but the timing is not unusual.
A deliberately short first day is such an obvious fix and I have never once planned one.