James - Surfing with Sartre: an aquatic inquiry into a life of meaning

N OT SO LONG AGO, in the dark days before the forty-hour workweek, the average person worked constantly, without time to completely rest, let alone laze around, get creative, and maybe take up surfing. Fortunately, history brought something of a revolution. By the early 1940s, the labor movement had won limited workdays, weekends off, and periodic vacations for most workers. The postwar economy boomed. And many people hit the beach in this new leisure culture, finding new forms of meaning. Nowadays, in our more leisurely style of capitalism, the workaday surfer can be found at surf breaks the world over, stoked in gushing exuberance about the better waves of the day, feeling lighter about the stresses of work, acting as if the whole meaning of human existence can be found in the simple act of riding a wave.

And I mean, like, super stoked, at least in the peak moments. As in effusive, bursting forth in hoots and howls. As in feeling like things are easy. Fine. Golden. As though you can just relax and eat some nice tacos. As in you were worried about some things, but what were they again? Maybe the surfer gushes with profoundly vague slogans. Only a surfer knows the feeling; Problems just wash off in the water; Its all connected; You just have to tap into something bigger, you know what Im saying? And maybe the honest answer is Actually, what are you saying? But, you know, whatever, because who cares? Cant the vague slogans just express the easy moment, without stating carefully defined truths? Surely complete thoughts arent always necessary, if only because the world can never be mastered in language, even in the most precisely chosen words. When youre stoked about the waves on which everything totally came together, or when you got a serious, proper tube, and you rode inside the tube of the wave for what felt like ages, you dont need to get control of anything. Youre stoked precisely because nothing else has to happen. Because nothing has to change. Because you can just be. Because right there at 3:15 p.m. on a Monday after a good surf session in Southern California, standing by the taco truck, under a fortunate sun, you are being.

Surfers arent ungrateful slackersat least not in any greater proportion than the general population. Most surfers work. They show up to work even when the waves are cracking, moved by that pained sense of duty that comes in acting contrary to the strong inclination to go surfing. The workaholic shows up to work eagerly, with a zeal for money and self-promotion that requires no thought of duty. But then whose work has greater moral worth? The one who is solemnly moved by duty, or the one who does as he likes?

For Immanuel Kant, the Enlightenment philosopher and moral rigorist, the moral worth of an action springs from its motives, and the workaday surfer who shows up from dutymaybe solely from dutywould be especially praiseworthy for doing what he or she really isnt inclined to do. Yet the high-minded, ber-rationalist philosopher (one of the big philosophers of all time, alongside Plato and Aristotle of ancient Greece) probably isnt the surfers philosopher. Although Kant was apparently quite the party animal in his youth, he traveled little beyond his hometown of Knigsberg, Germany. It was said that you could set your watch by his daily walk, while he presumably worked in deep thought. The hardworking genius was skeptical about happiness and hyperintellectual about morality and made much of strict conformity to law, and for those reasons alone a surfer might look elsewhere for help in articulating what is distinctively good about the surfer life.

Not that work these days is so terrible in itself. Most people can find some sort of meaning in a job taken to pay the bills. The time can fly while you get into a flow state (of which more later) while arguing about the new kitchen area policy, plowing through e-mails, or restocking a grocery store shelf. But most of us cant constantly pay close attention, especially not when the job turns mundane. The mind wanders, often to what one is missing. And so the surfer can often be found awash in daydreams of glorious wave-riding moments, at the keyboard, cash register, or roller brush, going through the motions, not quite into work with his or her whole being.

I once worked as a window cleaner for various restaurants. This paid mainly in flexibility, so that I could surf when the waves turned on. There was also joy in efficiently whipping the squeegee over the glass panes, without a drop left behind, and then, a moment later, opening the door for a customer with a pleasant greeting. The groove of fluid performance was intrinsically pleasingnot to mention time efficient, which put me on the road to surfing more speedily. Yet on the days when the wind would clock offshore, grooming the wave faces gently, with a solid six-foot ground swell running, when all I could think about was how