The Day Hobie Made Nixon a Surfboard
18 comments
·March 15, 2025mlsu
rqtwteye
Are there any hobbies/activities that aren't constantly moving upmarket? I am having trouble thinking of any.
nradov
Maybe basketball? If you have access to a public court then it doesn't cost much. We still see some top NBA draft picks who grew up relatively poor, without access to expensive equipment or private coaching. The equipment makes less difference in basketball than almost any other sport.
steveBK123
I've thought about this a lot. Across a all of my hobbies I've seen shrinking markets, decreasing sales, fewer consumers, decreased companies in the space.. and offset by higher prices and longer product cycles.
1) I think it's partially a time thing. You read economists vision of the future back 50-75 years ago and they imagined automation would give us more leisure time.
In practice there's a bifurcation with the K shaped economy where a lot of white collar jobs have become more time demanding (nights/weekends) such that we have a lot more money but even less time. So more than ever before, we try to by shortcuts to time/happiness with money. I find I have a lot of trouble finding long blocks of time to spend uninterrupted on my hobbies.
2) Along with this society has become ever more consumeristic. I note that across my friends and acquaintances, it doesn't strike me that many even.. have hobbies. Hobbies are almost an oddity now.
1&2 conflate to make for a lot of hobbyist GAS (gear acquisition syndrome) such that people spend more time reading/watching reviews/shopping/trading gear than they do actually doing their hobbies. Its a lot easier to spend 30min during my lunch break shopping for some accessories than it is to get away from my desk and actually do my hobby.
pimlottc
I read something once that said there’s 4 main modes for interacting with any hobby: doing the thing, talking about doing the thing, collecting gear for doing the thing, and talking about gear for doing the thing
rqtwteye
"hobbyist GAS (gear acquisition syndrome) such that people spend more time reading/watching reviews/shopping/trading gear than they do actually doing their hobbies. "
That's a huge problem for photographers and bikers. Much easier and less time and effort consuming to buy nice gear than to actually use it.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF
I want to say either woodworking or recreational drug use, but I don't know enough about either to be sure.
Surfing and warehouse lofts both depend on access to specific chunks of land that are in high demand. The thought of "bumming it" on a beach is hilarious to me. Beaches are all owned by rich folks.
Actually, considering how fucked up the US housing market is, most people can't get into woodworking because they live in little apartments with no garages... you'd have to belong to a makerspace or something. Ironically I once belonged to a makerspace in a warehouse-turned-bohemian-arts building
quesera
> Beaches are all owned by rich folks
Thread-relevantly: Not in California! All beaches are public, although some self-important transplants like to argue a right to restrict access. Vinod Khosla is one such transplant.
decimalenough
Beach bumming is still alive and well in Australia. There's thousands and thousands of miles of beach, all of it public, and while local councils try to clamp down on people living in vans, there's only so much they can do.
dav
Disc Golf holding steady I suspect.
dmkolobov
Freakbike building is one, although rather niche :)
IncreasePosts
Yes, but they're the ones that are hard to talk about because they necessarily remained unpopular.
Collecting beanie babies?
cbsks
Skateboarding?
semi-extrinsic
Yeah, I would say skateboarding or rollerblading. Probably slacklining as well.
tayo42
Surfing exploded in the 10 years becasue of the 100 dollar wavestorm. The hobby is too accessible imo.
The used board market is terrible for resell. $900+ sell for 2-300 used. I was able to hagle an album down to 600.
I bummed around and surfed all day for recently. It's a lot of ppl with roommates, restaurant workers, construction.
xbar
In the mid-70s we'd play soccer at a school overlooking the western White House.
Corky Carroll played concerts at my elementary school auditorium and we'd buy lobster from the shop across from Hobie's and have birthday parties on the beach at Dana Point harbor and camp at Doheny State Beach for summer vacation, going to grunion runs, and driving down to San Onofre to body surf at Trestles.
We never saw Nixon near the fence, but we looked a lot and imagined he might be there watching us play.
This is a topic near and dear to my heart!
Cottons is the break directly in front of Casa Pacifica. It's a long, easy peeling left-hander (meaning: looking at it from the beach, the wave curl moves from left to right as the wave breaks). I've surfed there several times. It's so amusing to imagine President Nixon pacing around in the house atop the cliff with a bunch of dirty hippies riding the waves below.
The history of surfing in this area is fascinating and drastically different from today. In 1960, when this story takes place, surfing was deeply counterculture. You could live in a beach shack in Southern California on bum's income — many people did. Although surfing originated in Hawaii, Southern California modernized it. "The Endless Summer" perfectly captures the flavor of this era of surfing and is well worth watching even for non-surfers.
Orange County birthed the modern surfboard, constructed with a stiff fiberglass and resin outer shell (the "glass") and foam interior (the "blank"). This construction technique was adapted from methods used by OC's aerospace defense contractors. It's perfect symmetry: the crew-cut engineers working on missiles and fighter jets, trading construction techniques with beatnik hippies trying to find a better waveriding vehicle. Nixon was hilariously in the geographic center of this intersection.
In the decades since then, the sport of surfing has moved monotonically upmarket. Today, if you're surfing in the U.S.A, you're wealthy. A lot of white collar desk workers started surfing in 2020, easier to get in the water if you work an email job. It's similar to living in an old warehouse in Tribeca NYC -- in the good old days it was the cheapest lifestyle you could live; today you pay for the privilege.