I Can’t Make Money Surfing
A Ramble Surfing, Capitalism, and Joy
A couple of weeks ago, just as the heavy rains eased, I drove out to Santa Barbara. It’s a beautiful town surrounded by a gold and green mountain range to the east and the Channel Islands to the west. The waves people surf there are often small but peeling and long—so much better than my local surf break. When I was down there I went to Rincon, an incredibly famous right-hand point break just south of Santa Barbara. The wave there, when it’s working well, peels beside the shore endlessly until it reaches a driftwood beach. As I paddled out with my friend Sandy and some of his friends from grad school, I couldn’t seem to get into anything very well. I had a short board, and the tide was too high, the waves not steep enough to lift me into them. Eventually I got on the longer board I lent Sandy after he tired from surfing. Finally, sitting further up toward the beginning of the breaking waves, surrounded by a group of kids younger and much better than me, all blond and graceful with their longboards, I managed to catch one of the nicer waves of my life, dodging little bits of whitewater, scooping up and down the waves face smoothly, riding it straight into the sand. I’m not sure how no one else saw it coming, it was so clear the way the pulse of water was pushing up and out from the seafloor. I crouched at a point, seeing a boogie boarder looking up to me, returning my smile.
I can’t quite describe clearly what it is I love about surfing, just that I love it. So after this ramble, I’ll stay quiet, stop bothering you with conversations you don’t care to think about. This isn’t a newsletter on surfing, but surfing is a big part of my life now, so I felt like sharing it, just a little.
Surfing is something, in the past two years, that I have come to obsess over. I often find myself, when I’m alone with nothing else on my mind, wondering what variables might have effected the swell today, what kind of interval might be best for a spot I’ve never surfed. I watch videos, admiring how people surf with such distinct style and yet are essentially only doing three, maybe four tricks—backside turn, frontside turn, air, and barrels. I honestly didn’t expect this when I started. It just sounded fun, and a little easier than skating, which I was growing bored of for the fifteenth time in my life. But, as I said, it’s an obsession now, a craze that I find myself constantly thinking about. It’s nearly a distraction. However, it’s the healthiest distraction I could have. It has, simply put, channeled my overthinking anxiety into one simple pursuit of catching a good wave, and learning how to be on it. When I’m surfing, there’s not much else to do but deal with the waves as they come. There is no time to contemplate. You quite seriously need to remain present.
Telling friends about a good wave I’ve caught, or a scary fall, I can tell they are happy for my joy, yet don’t quite understand what it is that makes it so beautiful to me. It is something hard to articulate. And from that, I grow sad, only because I want others to understand that feeling. But now, when I meet someone and know they surf, I find it easy to talk with them since they know that feeling well. For those people, it’s honestly what I most wish to talk about. And I start to understand the stereotype of the surfer burnout—all they talk about is the waves and nothing else, because nothing else matters.
If I have an extra hour or two in the day, that’s what I do now. When I’m home I am watching videos of people surfing, analyzing how they take off, studying the sandbars and waves and tides when I get to the beach, learning what to look for at the break. Essentially, I’m doing that thing you do when you’re new and in love: I’m immersing myself in the joy and awe of it all. Fuck, I even went to O’ahu to visit a friend and meet a traditional Hawai’ian surfboard shaper, Tom Pohaku.
However, besides a couple articles I will write about Tom and surfing culture and its history, there is little to gain from the sport as far as financial well-being. I’m not gonna get rich surfing. In fact, it’ll likely keep me pretty broke, seeing as the boards are fragile and not cheap, and the wetsuits inevitably deteriorate and will at some point no longer keep me warm, and I’ll have to buy another, just as expensive, layer of skin to hold back hypothermia. I’ll obsess over surfing’s every nuance for the rest of my life, yet even if I get good, I won’t make money off it. I can’t monetize it, turn myself or it into some made-up California-centric archetype of surfing to then sell to social media. Truly, if you surf, you cannot dream of making it labor.
Capitalism today seems so desperate for us to turn our passions into money-making ventures—to monetize anything that we do. If we surf we should try to make a T-shirt brand out of it. If we love to read we should write reviews. If we draw we should become an illustrator. In capitalism, the ability to monetize any and every piece of your waking life is to show faith to the god called capitalism that Derek Thompson in a somewhat veiled way calls “workism.” If you don’t monetize the photos you take of yourself at the thrift store, you're not doing it right. If you don’t start selling those scarves you're knitting, how are you to know that what you're doing is good? If you’re not making a vlog of your life as a surfer, how are you supposed to justify all the miles you’re putting on your car, all the gas you’re emitting?
It seems as though anything can be turned into profit, into a form of material currency to trade for other things, some of which we might need, but most of which we probably don’t. There are some things still out there that have no true path to money-making, at least in any substantial way. And this, writing itself, is an easily monetizeable skill, along with the drawing I do, my knowledge of coffee, and my ability to organize things. However, the one thing that I, at least personally, cannot make money off, is surfing.
Surfing has been associated with stoned burnouts for a few decades now, ever since white men in Southern California co-opted this ancient Hawai’ian sport and claimed it as their own, or the ones who knew how to do it better (painting with a broad, but still largely true, brush). And since then surfing has been associated with those burnouts for a good reason—anyone who truly loves surfing would rather be sitting at the beach waiting for the swell and the tide to line up just right, and go play in the waves. They don’t want to work, because work doesn’t move with tides. They want to be there at the perfect time, to catch something magical. Nothing else matters.
Myself, I’m still so new to surfing that I don’t care when I go because each time I go teaches me something knew about how the swells, tides, and seasons affect the way the ocean breaks. And if the waves suck, at least I’ll have fun duck-diving with surf scoters. Surfing, for me and most who do it (even the one’s who do end up making money off it), is an act of joy. We have found something insatiably beautiful to fulfill our time with, to challenge ourselves, to play, even when things in our lives on land are anything but calm. We can go to the waves and forget about all that—the ocean is massive and strong and you can’t think about anything else while you’re out. And why would any of that other stuff matter? We have the fortune to be able to surf at all. What luck we found it, and that we have the time to do it. So it can never be about money. It wouldn’t be surfing if it was.
Though, I’m sure, there are many people out there trying to change that. The industry itself has been growing for years and years and thanks to the pandemic many more people, such as myself, have grown a love-affair with the sport. And more people surfing only means one thing in this world—more money to be made. It’ll be a passion that some of us could turn into a small money maker. It can be a part of what some horrifyingly might call the “passion economy.” Until then and after, I’ll be in the water as much as I can, not thinking about any of this, just trying to stand and feel like I’m flying on a wave.
