Pro or Joe? Who gets more out of surfing? Photo: Thomas Ashlock//Unsplash
There are professional surfers. The absurdity here lies in the simplicity of that statement. There exists people who have actually managed to turn an activity deemed meaningless or silly by many into a career. These people appear to be living the dream: traveling, bronzed to perfection from spending every waking minute outside around other beautiful, bronzed, athletic people. And they make money doing it. They must have it figured out… right?
Turning one’s passion into a job comes with consequences. Surfing, which was once the light in one’s life, is now the flame they must stoke to sustain themselves. Sustaining brand partnerships, a spot on the tour, a segment in the latest video, a page in a mag… it’s no longer reason to froth. It’s money on the table to pay for the travel, the accommodation, the new boards. Surfing is no longer about surfing. It’s about marketing, athletic performance, self-promotion, and a million things that have no direct tie to surfing.
But pause for a moment. It’s easy, you may be thinking, for you to deny the pleasures of being a pro surfer. You could never be one! And this is true. But my skepticism in the pure joy of making money from surfing comes from the larger question of mixing passions with jobs. People often advise against turning your passion into a career, because it “takes the fun out of” whatever used to bring you joy.
Competitive surfing, especially, can be draining for surfers on tour. Because it’s a competition, there are winners and losers. High expectations, intense training, and demanding schedules all add up to what sometimes ends up being nothing. Mid-season cuts, contest losses, injuries, and travel obstacles are all stressful factors that eat into the experience of surfing we imagine as being joyous for these pros.
Of course, the caveat here is that surfing, unlike many other things, is difficult to progress at unless you can do it all the time, or at least very consistently. While no one is saying there is an obligation to improve at surfing to enjoy it, there is a certain joy in improving at things. Or, should I say, it’s more fun to get better than worse.
Most people can “surf” (catch unbroken waves, cruise down the line, etc.) fairly quickly. But learning to do snaps, cutbacks, walk the nose… these things require not only familiarity reading waves, which means a lot of time in the water, but also just practice. Probably daily.
It can be difficult for people to carve out time every day to devote to surfing if they are not getting paid to do it. Even more difficult to time this one session a day when the tide is right and when the swell is on and drive to where the direction is going to be working. This all seems a little silly, but there is the dilemma.
The joy of passions being sucked dry by over-indulging or applying pressure to these activities applies to lots of things. For instance, I grew up ski racing. Not just skiing for fun, but regularly training in sub-zero temperatures for six to 10 hours at a time: hiking up trails instead of taking the lift to loop watered-down GS tracks, ditching one ski for the day to learn balance, sprinting uphill in ski boots. It was insanely rewarding, and I improved drastically over the years, technically and mentally. It was fun, social, challenging, and definitely a “passion” as I devoted more time to it over the years. Skiing was something I gained identity from, grew from, and greatly enjoyed.
However, my life now does not involve skiing, save for the occasional family trip or visit home. Skiing is not something I ever romanticized, though it certainly was romantic, being outside in the crisp air, and even more so on powder days when the glades got good. But in my current daily life, I surf far more than I ski. And I’m way worse at surfing than skiing. My point in sharing this story is that the things we devote time to, the things we find joy in, are not necessarily the things we are best at.
Thus, my question: Is surfing better as a hobby or a career? Surf as a hobby and it remains an enjoyable escape from the realities and mundane aspects of life. But there’s also the tough reality that you may never get to devote the time you really want to devote to it, and it may be hard to improve. Surf as a career, and you’ll get better, but it’s because you have to, because now the rest of your life depends on the thing that used to be a fun escape.
Many surfers, besides going the competitive route, turn to alternative practices in the industry to maintain a full-time surfing life. Filming, shaping, event organizing, the list goes on. But surrounding oneself with the thing they love, while being one step removed, can be torture.
There’s also more onus on the conditions when there’s money on the line. Even with the best surfers and big budgets, there’s the possibility of losing money. Storm Surfers, a documentary about big wave surfing featuring Tom Carroll and Ross Clark-Jones, cost five-million dollars to produce, and to date has made about $117,000 dollars.
Add into the mix the possibility of getting skunked (which isn’t as uncommon as you’d think, even with swell forecasting) and you have the potential for a pretty bummer situation. If surfing and traveling is your passion, getting stuck somewhere with no waves for a week is annoying, but not the end of the world. If it’s your job and there are sponsors expecting content they fronted money for, it’s a big problem.
Then there’s the aspect of adding money into something that is supposed to be “pure.” Luke Cederman and Mackenzie Bowden put out a pretty funny video on the lives of pro surfers, pointing to the shallow mindsets and materialistic ideas that often accompany fame and fortune from any passion turned job.
Barrel dodging or otherwise, it’s all good when the only pressure comes from you. Photo: @nosedrain
Sterling Spencer also spoke out about the hardships of competitive surfing, explaining that he felt as if his soul was leaving him because he was “surfing for videos online. I wasn’t happy. I had a wonderful life of traveling the world, but I was depressed.” When he went back to the basics and went home to his family, he fell in love with surfing again. Because then surfing was a hobby, a part of his life, but not the sole purpose. Spencer can surf when he wants, how he wants, as much or as little as he wants.
Spencer experienced a phenomenon that has been psychologically analyzed and explained. This is what so many people feel when they go head-first into their passion, and it ends up being all consuming, leading to burnout.
The biggest misconception about passions is that they are “discovered” and we all have one true life purpose somewhere out there, waiting for us to frolic off into the sunset and do whatever it is that makes us tick. But a journal article from Yale-NUS College and Stanford University published in Psychological Science found that passions are developed, not found.
This means that telling people to find happiness by following their passion is bad advice, because people are more likely to give up when their passion becomes challenging. People “put all their eggs in one basket and drop that basket when it becomes difficult to carry.”
Translated to the question involving surfing as a career versus a hobby, I think the authors would agree that while surfing is a passion for many, surfing, like any other passion, is cultivated, not found, and exists best within a network of many passions that lead to a fulfilling life. Put more time and effort into surfing and it will become a greater interest, yielding more of the benefits following any other passion provides. But turn surfing into a job and it will be, well, just that: a job.
The freedom surfing offers for its expressive abilities, its emotional benefits, and the way it gets us out in nature are wonderful things that add to any rich, full life. But a rich and full life needs balance: meaning outside of surfing. That way, surfing can be preserved as a fun, enjoyable aspect of one’s existence. One of many hobbies, a passion amongst many passions.
