What Surfing Taught Me About Having Fun in a World That’s on Fire

I recently attended one of the thousands of No Kings protests held across the country. The next day, I went surfing. I truly enjoyed myself.

But then, because I’m a Democrat, I found myself wondering if having a good time during bad times makes me a bad person. Is it moral to enjoy a world at the intersection of looming AI apocalypse, climate catastrophe, and societal breakdown?

Ironically, this was exactly the kind of question I thought learning to surf would help me avoid. I’ve always taken current events a little personally. I used to write speeches for President Barack Obama, so you could argue that this tendency has helped me professionally and personally.

Advertisement

Advertisement

Then, during the pandemic, a perfect storm of global crises became an existential one. A year devoted primarily to wine and PlayStation didn’t help. In 2022, approaching my 36th birthday and desperate to break free from a downward spiral of depression, I bought my first surf board. 

Because most of what I knew about surfing came from the Beach Boys, I assumed I’d find an escape from the dread that accompanied reading the news. But it turned out surfing was more connected to crisis than I realized. Great waves in one place often start with tragedy someplace else. 

Nowhere is this truer than on the Jersey Shore, where I learned to surf. Here’s just one example. On Sept. 20, 2017, Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico. The storm killed more than 3,000 people, knocked out the island’s power grid, and caused more than $90 billion dollars in property damage. Eleven days later, a Jersey–based news site posted a video of Maria’s arrival in the Garden State. The caption read, in part, “Surfers cash in on the great conditions.”

Advertisement

During my first few months in the water, I found a clever way of setting aside concerns that a broken world made fun immoral: I didn’t have any. Between abject terror, physical exhaustion, and being pummeled and humiliated by waves the size of garden gnomes, I never had to worry about having too grand a time. But I stuck with it. The fear of being dashed against a stone jetty or eaten by a great white shark was, while unpleasant, vastly preferable to depression. Eventually, to my surprise, I started catching waves. Before too long, I couldn’t stop smiling each time I hopped off my board. 

My new hobby thus put me between a rock and a hard place. If I couldn’t have a good time surfing—an activity so iconically fun it’s been enjoyed by everyone from Michaelangelo (the ninja turtle, not the sculptor) to Lilo and Stitch—then that made me a wet blanket. But I fretted that the alternative, having a great time and not worrying about a world in crisis, would make me complicit. It was hard not to think about my friends still in politics, ceaselessly fighting the good fight. By spending so much time on something so frivolous, wasn’t I betraying my broader responsibility to the world?  

Advertisement

At times, riding climate-change-fueled waves felt like dancing to the fiddle as Rome burned. 

No single surf session changed my mind. Instead, there was an accumulation of tiny moments, diamonds sparkling so brightly they changed the way I thought about the rough. The time I clocked a pod of Jersey bros gawking at a dolphin. The time, on a trip to California, when an otter floated alongside me. The winter wave I thought would pound me into oblivion, but which instead launched me, via a kind of reverse gravity, from trough to lip. 

The more fun I had in the ocean, the more passionate I felt about protecting our planet. It made me appreciate how much is left to save. About eight months after I started surfing, a speechwriting client approached me about a project involving climate change. While the work seemed interesting and meaningful, my instinct was to say “no.” I worried I couldn’t handle so much depressing information. But thanks in no small part to waves made more intense by a warming planet, I went for it. 

Advertisement

The project did not, I’m sorry to say, solve climate change. But I’m glad that surfing helped make me the kind of person willing to try.  

Today, I look back on the bygone era (2023) when I first learned to surf and can’t help but feel naïve. Climate isn’t the only crisis far worse now than it was two years ago. The rule of law is fraying. President Donald Trump is trying to turn the military against Americans. Cruelty toward the most vulnerable is, it seems, in vogue. Sometimes reading the news these days, I’m reminded of the line in Casablanca where a young Bulgarian refugee describes her homeland. “The devil has the people by the throat.”  

And yet, is anything made better by obsessing over how terrible everything is? At some point in my life, I internalized the idea that I had a responsibility to bear witness to as much dispiriting information as possible. I don’t think I was alone. The instinct behind this trend—to broaden one’s circle of concern—was noble. As Martin Luther King famously put it, “We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of identity.” But when did our mutual garment become so funereal?

Advertisement

Joy, it is sometimes said these days, is resistance. Maybe so. One of the most striking features of the No Kings day protests attended by millions of Americans was just how joyous many of them were.

But fun is different. It’s superficial. It’s frivolous. And it’s less an act of resistance than an affirmation that there is still something worth resisting for. That’s especially true right now, when the world seems increasingly in the hands of people who have unlimited wealth, money, and power, yet seem unable to crack a smile. 

I’m still no advocate of pure escapism. As much as I would love to devote myself to surfing and nothing else, it would feel too much like shirking a debt. But several years after picking up a board I’ve learned that loving life in a world filled with tragedy doesn’t make you complicit. 

It makes you complete.