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Why did I think skaters are some of the most original, creative people, who have a different lens of viewing the world, and are adept problem solvers, when in reality a lot of them are just shitty people with poor life skills?
People skating less and fading away into obscurity seemed like a hopeless oblivion to fall into, but now I understand that you need to have a job and pay your bills and take care of your shit, be a good person, while also spending as much time with your family as you can because they wont always be there, which sometimes doesn't allow for as much time having selfish fun. Skateboarding is so vain, it's so selfish. It's all about you while you're doing it. If you try to say it's not, you're lying to yourself.
I love skateboarding, but I'm honestly not too fond of a lot of skateboarders. It's easy to talk to people, but I feel like I don't really want to befriend dudes at the local park. I don't want to invite them over to my home to disrespect my things, I just want to be homies at the park and kick it there. It's hard to make new friends in skating, but it's easy to kick it with skaters. I just can only take so much before I need to dip and return to "the real world".
This, to me is a profound truth, no matter what your hobby is or favorite thing in the world may be. The skateboarding population, as imaginative and cutting-edge as you may believe it to be, is just like any population - a lot of f-king idiots in the middle. Skateboarders are just as bad as jocks and any athlete, and many of them involve themselves in literally one line of thinking - skateboarding. Plenty of threads and laments have been written about it, that skateboarders should stop doing podcasts because they sound like dullards.
Most people on earth want to believe they are a part or something different / better / more imaginative /more intuitive / than the mainstream. And skateboarding is just one of those ways of thinking. Having an affinity for skateboarding can involve a number of interests, which includes but is not limited to appreciation for physics, geometry, architecture, photography, motion, the human body, urban planning, art, dance, concrete shaping... plenty of other stuff. People that are drawn to skateboarding believe that they are different, and that they see shapes and public spaces differently than other people do. But as sharp, savvy and resourceful as you want to believe we all are, we're actually just dumb monkeys impressed by random physics that we go "oooh" and "ahhh" over, as if we were watching a good football play or anything else that involves movement or "sport". For example, have you ever seen memes about how men will express more emotion (ie. going "oooh" and "aahh") over seeing a stylish skate trick than they will communicate enthusiasm while having sex with a girl? I'm talking about that caveman kinda shit.
Although I used to think differently - being interested in skateboarding does not automatically make you cooler, different, smarter, more creative, more punk or nihilistic, fashionable, nor ahead-of-the-times than your peers. Sometimes it even can set us back in terms of what we care about versus what is actually important in the world. After all, we are playing with toys at the end of the day.
I've almost always lived in big, developing cities across the US. My attitude was that the USA was progressive enough and level-headed, until I drove around the country a bunch of times and saw what makes up everything else that makes up the USA, outside of major cities... it's literally the majority of the country. And that's how every country is.
You mention yourself almost always living in big developing cities and it shows. We are actually not monkeys anymore, we have evolved past «monkey» and «caveman» . Don’t think you know «most people» just because you’ve travelled a bit inside your own country. I don’t know you, but my first impression is that you need to take a deeper look at yourself.
I think you read between the lines in a very odd way. We are not better than others was the main message, yet, we feel ourselves to be so much better than others simply because we ride skateboards and listen to the echo chambers that is social media. Pre-social media it was the skate mags.
Having a few talented writers employed at these mags led entire generations to treat their outlooks as the gospel. I'm not even sure how many times a word count requirement has forced some cheesiness to be squeezed out, that I personally interpreted as life advice. We can stroke our own egos by believing in these things, but at the end of the day we are all individuals and not some blessed group predestined by an omnipresent force to enjoy riding skateboards and be better than everyone else.
I have friends that skate and are family men and business owners. I also have friends that skate that are constantly making terrible life decisions and exacerbating their already bad circumstances. These people have skateboarding in common, but probably not much else beyond it. How can we argue they are both employing these complex mental processes we like to believe we hold?
We are who we choose to be, with each decision we make.
To be in your 30's, grasping onto the belief your childhood dream is still going to come true, and not actively working towards improving your situation, is pretty wack man.
It's okay to have fun and enjoy something you're passionate about, but it's not a defining personality trait. If you're homeless, jobless, and constantly leeching off people, but you're stacking clips, you're still a shit person. Once you have that knee injury (or some other life altering injury), or once your body's age starts catching up with you, it's going to be a rude awakening that nobody wants to be around you.
Skateboarding is so awesome, but skateboarders can be so awful.
Also, I'm not talking to any person specifically on SLAP, just in the 2nd person POV for clarity's sake.
Topic: What skateboard related thoughts keep you up at night? (Read 4947 times)