If you’re lucky enough to be at the beach, you’re lucky enough. Photo: Jay Ruzesky
I’ve recently been clicking on the comments sections of various surfing websites, just to check in on our sport’s current zeitgeist, perusing reaction to content ranging from professional competition and surf travel, to more fraught cultural issues like wave pool proliferation and the transgender surfing crisis (if such a thing actually exists). Now, I realize that you can’t accurately judge the collective tone of any demographic based solely by online comments, any more than you could’ve back in the day, when “letters to the editor” served the same function in print. However, the level of vitriol expressed in modern “comment culture” does give one the impression, at least, that today’s surfers are a pretty unhappy lot. Which, in my opinion, begs the question: “Collectively, when were surfers happiest?”
Incredibly, happiness has only been a subject of serious study since the late 1990s, when leading researchers like Marty Seligman, Sonja Lyubomirsky and Ed Deiner began quantifying the concept of subjective well-being and what came to be known as “positive psychology.” In the scientific literature related to this new field of study, happiness is referred to as hedonia, defined as the presence of positive emotions and the absence of negative emotions. Elementary, and much easier to calibrate when viewed subjectively, on the basis of individual experience; try telling the rankest beginner, standing up on their surf school soft-top for the first time and riding whitewater all the way to shore, that they’re not the happiest surfer who’s ever been. But the question of when hedonia applied most pervasively to the majority of surfers in any particular period in history invites a more objective take, with those results telling us as much about the current state of the sport as it does any past era.
“There’s always the temptation to look back at surfing history through rose-tinted glasses,” says Matt Warshaw, eminent surf historian and author of The Encyclopedia of Surfing. “But Malibu in the 1950s, experienced by a very small group of surfers, like Vickie Flaxman, Matt Kivlin, Joe Quigg and Tommy Zahn, represented a peak era, so far as happiness goes. For all the surfers in Southern California, really. We had just won a world war a few years before, the economy was booming and the future looked pretty good. Surf-wise, they were doing something no one else was doing, everything with board design and performance was changing quickly, and if you want to believe that photos of that time truly captured what was going on, that whole period just had a dreamy feel. A lot of the things that have stressed surfers out for so long afterward just didn’t exist.”
I know what you’re thinking, and I don’t blame you — ask just about any surfer, of any age, to name the main source of stress in their lives and the same word comes up time and time again: crowds. Crowds of “other” surfers, the primary component of negative emotions, i.e. unhappiness. And sure, those hordes of fellow wave-riders are an easy hook on which to hang all that angst. But when viewed from a higher altitude, maybe a little too easy to blame. After all, while a relative handful of proto-California surfers were seriously vexed in the wake of the early-60s, post-Gidget surf boom, the rest of all those new surfers clogging the lineups here in the U.S.A. and around the world were almost joyful in the discovery of this new sport; was there ever a happier depiction of surfing than in 1966’s The Endless Summer? The title said it all.
“When it comes to defining collective happiness during any particular period in surfing, you have to consider the impact of the accoutrements surrounding it,” says Dave Gilovich, 73, who, having served as a surfing magazine editor, influential surfwear executive and director at Surfline, offers what could only be called an extremely informed perspective on the topic. “So, you have to look at the early 1960s. The films, the music, the magazines, all of it telling you how great surfing was. No other era celebrated surfing like it was a years-long party, and in many ways, it really was. Before there were any intellectual conversations about the meaning of it all, it was just presented as being so much fun. Which is what brought so many people into it.”
The Gudauskas clan has always symbolized happiness in the surf community. Photo: Positive Vibe Warriors//Dane Gudauskas
There it is again, the whole “So many people” problem, undeniably the source of almost all the stated dissatisfaction, disappointment and, yes, unhappiness associated with the modern surfing experience. Considered in this light, not simply blaming crowds for a lack of hedonia becomes a radical idea. One that Malibu documentary filmmaker Roko Belic hasn’t been afraid to examine.
“When you look at all the old pictures from the forties and fifties, at places like Waikiki, San Onofre and Malibu, the surfers look blissed out,” says Belic, 53, and an accomplished surfer himself. “Like they’re out there playing in the surf, for fun. Too often today, surfers don’t look like that anymore. We’ve intensified the experience with all these unreasonable expectations, which leads to added stress, and, ultimately, disappointment.”
Belic isn’t just riffing here. His award-winning 2012 documentary, Happy, took a deep dive into the concept, resulting in a surprising revelation about not only the health and psychological benefits of positive emotions, but the role surfing had to play in his own emotional state.
“I began working on the film during a 12-year hiatus from surfing,” explains Belic. “But when I started learning more about the value of play as it relates to happiness, how powerfully play affects the brain, I decided to start surfing again. It was almost like the child in me knew how fun and rewarding surfing could be if thought of as play.”
Yet there’s something else at play here (pardon the pun), an awareness of which makes my initial question meaningless in the narrowness of its scope. The idea that surfing happiness, whether collective or individual, isn’t something we have to look back for, but a state of positive emotion to be found by looking inward.
“Again, look back at those photos of the old-timers,” says Roko Belic. “And beyond just how much fun they seemed to be having, you could tell by their expressions how grateful they were. Grateful just to be there, to be doing something as wonderful as surfing.”
Naïve? Perhaps. But perhaps worth a try. If each of us began approaching the surfing experience with more gratitude than unreasonable expectation — not all at once, just baby steps — the individual ID just might become the collective’s, hedonia could reign in even the most crowded lineups, and this one you’re living in be the happiest surfing era ever.
