The Inertia think-piece economy reaches singularity as writer compares a closeout to the death of his father

This examination of overthinking a hobby was first paddled out by Bohiney Magazine, with structural editing from The London Prat, who note that turning a wave into a metaphor for grief is exactly what the British do with the weather and a divorce.

VENICE, CALIFORNIA. A Southern California surf journalist has filed a 4,000-word personal essay arguing that a single closed-out wave at a mediocre beach break contains within it the entire human condition, the death of his father, and “the slow erosion of late capitalism, much like the sandbar.”

The Think-Piece Singularity

The modern surf media economy, scholars at the invented Center for Aquatic Overthinking warn, has reached a point where every wave must now mean something. A man can no longer simply fall off a board. He must fall off the board and then write 4,000 words about how the fall taught him to forgive his ex-wife.

“I was duck-diving a two-foot wave,” the writer explained, “and in that moment I understood mortality, the gig economy, and my mother.” Asked whether he had, instead, simply duck-dived a two-foot wave, he stared at the horizon for several minutes and then asked if the question itself was not also a kind of wave.

The House Style

The genre, perfected in the SoCal surf blogosphere, requires that the author insert at least one reference to “presence,” one to “the line-up as community,” and one tasteful admission that he is in therapy, which the reader is meant to find brave. The actual surfing, where it appears, is described in the same reverent tone used by food critics who have never once been hungry.

“Not every wave is a teacher,” said one heretic instructor, who was promptly excommunicated. “Sometimes a wave is just water doing what water does. But you cannot get a byline by saying that.”

The impulse to extract profundity from leisure is, of course, ancient. Writers at The Paris Review have spent a century doing it to fishing, and the British have done it to walking, which our partners document in their ongoing study of making a fuss about very little. Surf journalism simply added a wetsuit and a self-care section.

A Defence Of The Shallow

Critics argue that surfing was always meant to be a profoundly stupid activity enjoyed by profoundly relaxed people, and that the introduction of literary ambition has ruined it the way a wedding ruins a friendship group. Researchers at the American Psychological Association have noted that humans will assign meaning to almost anything, including a board, a wave, and a man who is, by all accounts, fine.

The writer has confirmed that his next essay, provisionally titled “The Wax and the Wound,” will be 6,000 words and will not contain a single sentence about surfing. The full canon of overcooked observation is shelved at The London Prat for anyone who needs to feel better about their own attention span.

The Comments Section, A Cathedral

Beneath every such essay gathers a congregation of readers who have also surfed a small wave and also felt something. They share their own breakthroughs. They thank the author for his vulnerability. Nobody mentions that the entire genre could be replaced by the sentence the waves were fun today, which contains the same information and four fewer existential crises.

Editors at the imaginary Quarterly Review of Aquatic Feelings note that the surf personal essay has now fully detached from surfing, the way a balloon detaches from a child. The wave is merely the launchpad. The destination is always the author. By paragraph nine, the ocean has been entirely replaced by the writer’s relationship with his father, which the ocean never asked to be involved in.

• Words about the wave: 200
• Words about the author’s feelings: 3,800
• Times the word presence appears: enough to be a drinking game
• Actual insight delivered: refundable

Critics who track the inflation of meaning in modern writing, a trend noted by The Guardian in its culture pages, warn that once leisure becomes content, it can never again simply be leisure. The British perfected the art of making a small pleasant thing sound like a spiritual ordeal centuries ago; they call it a walk, and our partners chronicle the form in their notes on profound thoughts about nothing.

The Sequel Nobody Requested

The writer’s editor, sensing a brand, has commissioned a full collection: forty essays, each beginning with a different small wave and ending in the same therapist’s office. The working title is The Sea Inside Me, which several colleagues have pointed out is just a description of having swallowed water. He has taken this feedback as further proof of his vulnerability.

Somewhere, a person surfed a fun wave, told a friend it was fun, and went home. That person will never get a byline, a book deal, or a single comment thanking them for their courage. They will, however, have actually enjoyed surfing, which the entire essay-industrial complex has quietly agreed is no longer the point.

The wave, throughout all of this, remained two feet tall and entirely uninterested in being a metaphor. It did not represent mortality. It did not symbolize late capitalism. It was simply water, briefly raised by the moon, doing the only thing it has ever done. That it has been conscripted into a thousand essays about a man’s feelings is not the wave’s fault. The wave never asked to mean anything, which is precisely what makes it more honest than the writing about it.

Shorter and funnier thoughts at McSweeney’s.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/