Success is secretly frond upon in skate culture people aren't as supportive as they lead you to believe which is why so many pros become burn outs by the age of 27.
Mental illness and drug abuse is a bigger problem within the community than people realize, we'd rather fool ourselves into believing our schizophrenic bipolar buddy from down the lane was born a "all powerful demonic entity" or a "douche bag" or "just having fun" than get to understand what they're going through and try to intervene before things get worse... Why? Because misery loves company and what better way to keep some one down than encouraging or even laughing at their odd behavior.
We pretend like none of this is going on sit on our high horses and shit talk all day like gossip girls, it's wack and I hope the younger generation ignores a lot of the older folks and do better.
Edit: I believe suffering just to suffer has always been a massive yet covert part of the culture and because of this things rarely get better for us. The majority of skaters come from middle class to lower class homes, the good we could accomplish for young people if the culture wasn't so toxic smh. Things are slowly improving but people are freaking out and for good reasons, when real skaters are too burnt out to help make the changes we need shit is bound to get rocky...
Roller blading associations run the olympic skateboarding teams, like come on man.