A middle-aged person takes up a hobby: https://t.co/VQL0I75wBJ
— Defector (@DefectorMedia) December 30, 2022
Mild twist at the very end! Felix Kent, for Defector:
… The year I turned 40, I decided I wanted to learn to stand-up paddleboard. This was only a few years ago, and so the causal chain is easier to reconstruct. At a family gathering, I saw my cousin on a paddleboard. Then, later that summer, I was walking by the river where I live, and I saw a stranger on a paddleboard. It seemed really nice. The river is pretty, the trees are pretty. It seemed like it would be nice to spend time on the river in that way.
But this narrative still leaves a lot of unanswered questions. Why a paddleboard and not a kayak? Why that particular moment in time, when I had already lived in the same town for years and years, and no doubt seen dozens of people having a nice time paddleboarding? A lot of online articles about trends in paddleboard sales turn out to be thinly veiled or totally unveiled PR pitches. What the 2019 Outdoor Foundation (the Outdoor Foundation shares a website with the Outdoor Industry Organization) Special Report on Paddlesports & Safety tells me is that at the time they ran their numbers, there were 3.5 million stand-up paddleboarders in the U.S., and that 1.5 million people had adopted the sport since 2013. They also say, “Surf culture and mindset still lingers through the stand-up paddling community,” which gets at something important and also weird about stand-up paddleboarding, which is that although obviously its own thing, it can also feel like one of those collaborations Target does with fashion designers, where something self-evidently cool and also more-or-less unobtainable for normal people, in this case surfing, is made much less cool but at least available…
Even though it felt dorkier to succumb to an obvious trend-driven desire as a middle-aged person, in the most literal sense I could not possibly have done this earlier in my life. For one thing, I have more money; for another, I am not scared of driving in the same way. Both of these are developments I have complicated feelings about, especially the driving. Driving is, actually, a terrifying thing to do, and also bad for the world. However, driving is a useful precondition to taking up location-specific and equipment-heavy pastimes, as is disposable income…
Fun Read: <em>‘A Middle-Aged Person Takes Up A Hobby’</em>Post + Comments (135)