It's not the end of the world
Re-entry into the new decade wasn’t exactly the clean slate we thought we were toasting to on New Year’s Eve was it? Our hangovers came with koalas on fire. Assassinations. War. Plane crashes. Sober January. Hurley ditching wetsuits and team riders to make bath soaps and perfume. And WSL’s ELO got a promotion! To put it simply: the stoke has been difficult to locate in 2020. Things have been looking down down down across the board. In the surf world. The real world. Even the sexy/trendy/cool social media influencers we’re supposed to envy look lame and tired. Things are still a mess to be sure — we’re all gonna be in deep shit one way or another maybe forever (Inherent Bummer and all) — but it’s important to remember that things have always been bad and maybe always will be but sharks keep moving and so will we. Plus, we all have a gift. This is gonna sound corny, but that gift is stoke. We fucking surf! We win!
Our industry and culture might be a little bloated with kooks and VALS and dead brands walking cuz no one wants surf t-shirts right now, but we still have access to this undefinable completely metaphysical transcendental connection with the subconscious that brings an enthusiasm to our central nervous systems that keeps us sane even in the darkest depths of ELO-Instagram photo dump induced depression. Maybe it’s the salt in the sea or the womb-like security we have in the water, but it’s definitely something. And while we’re all chasing a slightly different feeling or glide or wave, when we find them, the results are the same: euphoria that sends us skipping and dancing and sprinting and scrambling across parking lots and down cliffs into the sea like our lives depend on it — and maybe they do.
I was trudging through the malaise of real life and an early January flat spell when I stumbled into a video that Matt Warshaw posted to his wonderful daily bread of a website The Encyclopedia of Surfing and think he might have just set the mood for 2020.
The video is a mashup of past, present and current surfing enthusiasm, but it could very well serve as the catalyst for reinvigorating this industry and culture in the new decade. Let’s lop the head off the past mistakes and missteps taken by our culture and re-bottle the energy and feeling in this video and fucking chug it! Let’s get the koalas some water and get back out there. It’s not the end of the world yet. I’m stoked, are you? —Travis Ferré
Watch this video and remember how lucky we are:
STOKE: (definition pulled from The Encyclopedia of Surfing)
Enduring surf slang expression meaning excited, pleased, happy, thrilled. "Stoke" is an English adaptation of the 17th-century Dutch word stok, used to describe the rearrangement of logs in a fireplace in order to bring up the flames. California surfers began using the word in the early or mid-'50s, and it never went out of fashion. Variations include "stoker," "surf-stoked," "stoke-um," "stokaboka," and "stokearama."
Research suggests that the lingering effects of surf stoke—what you feel after the adrenaline rush is gone—may be attributed to the negatively-charged ions given off by churned up water and sea spray, which can nudge up serotonin levels.
