Worth a read

I was talking to a good friend and customer the other day who used to race Jet skis and we got on the topic of what the sports costs now, I saw great similarities to the freestyle side of it as well , guys spending $20,000 on one off fuel injection systems for their race skis, $30,000 and $40,000 freestyle skis are the norm nowadays , then this morning I read this , I copied and pasted this and cut it to the interesting parts because I think it fits our situation in this sport to a T.



I see all of this as “hobby inflation,” and it has affected quite literally every single recreational activity and I’m not uniquely unlucky with my choice of pursuits. Hobby inflation can be seen in golf, skiing, indoor climbing, mountain biking, photography, knitting, tabletop games, and theatergoing. Articles and forum posts with titles such as “Why Is [Insert Hobby] ( Jet skis ) So Expensive Now?” have become a genre of writing unto themselves.

This growing exclusivity of leisure pursuits has ramifications that aren’t just economic. Gary Alan Fine, a Northwestern University sociologist who has studied a variety of recreational activities, wrote in his book Players and Pawns: How Chess Builds Community and Culture that hobbies create “social worlds” that have “an ideology of openness, and a supportive infrastructure.” In other words, hobbies can produce communities where, because the hobby itself takes top priority, the participants’ social or cultural differences become less important.

Surveying my phone’s contact list recently, I realized that most of my friends and acquaintances who are not like me—who are much older or much younger, who are richer or poorer, who toil in other lines of work, or who cast their ballots for other kinds of candidates—are people I know from hobbies. Hobby inflation, understood in this light, is about much more than price hikes: It’s about the shrinking and possible disappearance of opportunities for people from different backgrounds , parts of the country or different countries to get to know one another.


Personally I took my hobby and turned it into a business which basically destroyed my hobby , I now try to separate the two as I rarely work on Stand up skis in my normal day to day job , by changing course again this year and getting more into ski flipping I hope to separate the two even further and hopefully get my hobby back on track .

I look forward to meeting some of you guys at freerides this year.

That's spot on. heck most people i know from jetskiing don't even life in the same hemisphere

It seems to me that some people will always keep on chasing the white rabbit and eventually get bored/tired and move on to another hobby. While others are content with a stockish ski and enjoy being on the water with whatever is running that day. I will always regret the days I didn't get out on the water, not the ski that didn't have enough power or weighs a bit too much. Finding friends with similar mindsets to that will often yield more memories at the beach than trying to outdo one another.

joeschuit said:

It seems to me that some people will always keep on chasing the white rabbit and eventually get bored/tired and move on to another hobby. While others are content with a stockish ski and enjoy being on the water with whatever is running that day. I will always regret the days I didn't get out on the water, not the ski that didn't have enough power or weighs a bit too much. Finding friends with similar mindsets to that will often yield more memories at the beach than trying to outdo one another.

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Yes a couple of guys in our group were just like that , ridiculous amounts of money in their skis , then poof all gone , I have been in it long enough to see it happen at least three times now , with three different riding groups , of course they all of them lost their a$$ when they cashed out though.

I used to ask those guys if the fun they were having was worth the price they were paying , in the end I guess it wasn't and they were constantly working on their skis , crank rebuilds every year , top end maybe twice a year, buying VP MS 109 by the drum and hauling 15 gallon drums of it everywhere ,to me it seemed like a lot of effort and money spent for little return, it's not like these guys were backflipping or barrel rolling or anything that would require the kinds of power their skis had .