111 Surfing, Philosophy & the Search for Meaning: Longevity & Adventure with Aaron James

Has surfing started to feel more like a grind than a joy? What if the answer isn’t better waves or sharper turns—but a new philosophy?

In this powerful and thought-provoking conversation, philosopher and lifelong surfer Aaron James shares why he abandoned performance-based surfing in favor of adventure surfing—and how that shift brought back the joy, meaning, and connection he thought he’d lost in the lineup. If you've ever questioned what surfing means to you, this is your moment to rethink it all.

• Discover how redefining your surfing goals can reignite your stoke and deepen your relationship with the ocean.

• Learn how surfing mirrors our search for meaning, longevity, and even spirituality.

• Explore how the concept of attunement—not perfection—can transform both your surfing and your life.

Hit play now to hear how reframing your surfing mindset could be the most meaningful wave you ever catch.

https://learn.surfmastery.com/the-philosophy-of-surfing & www.surfmastery.com

Aarons' books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Aaron-James/author/B007CL9J5M?ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true

Other books mentioned:
The Mature Mind - Gene D. Cohen
The Mindful Body - Ellen Langer

Key Points

• Aaron James discusses the concept of 'adventure surfing,' a redefinition of his approach to surfing focusing on connection and enjoyment rather than performance and competition.

• Michael Frampton introduces the Surf Mastery Podcast and the conversation with Aaron James, focusing on how surfing shapes one's life, philosophy, and longevity.

• Aaron James shares his shift in surfing philosophy from seeking perfection and performance to embracing adventure surfing, emphasizing joy and connection over competition.

• Aaron James explains how philosophical thinking helped him redefine his relationship with surfing, allowing him to enjoy it in new ways without the pressure of performance standards.

• Aaron James discusses the concept of longevity and how philosophical ideas about mortality and the pursuit of a longer life can be connected to the practice of surfing.

• Aaron James proposes that the meaning of life is found in the stories we tell about our experiences, which allow us to find reconciliation and joy in living.

• Aaron James explains how surfing satisfies both our animalistic nature and our higher, spiritual selves, connecting us to the sublime and the larger universe.

• Aaron James discusses the social aspect of surfing and how it contributes to longevity and well-being, emphasizing the value of community and serendipitous interactions.

• Aaron James explores the concept of God and spirituality in relation to surfing, suggesting that surfing can be a form of attunement to the divine or the natural world.

• Aaron James argues that surfing is not inherently selfish but can be a self-transcending activity that enhances one's appreciation for life and connection with others. 

Outline

Surfing Philosophy and Attunement

• Aaron James discusses the concept of attunement in surfing, emphasizing the importance of constantly automating certain skills while paying attention to new challenges.

• Aaron redefines their approach to surfing as 'adventure surfing,' focusing on connection, being in the ocean, and surfing in beautiful, less crowded places with tricky waves.

• Michael Frampton, the host, introduces the Surf Mastery Podcast, which aims to help surfers improve their performance and longevity in the sport.

• Aaron shares their personal journey from pursuing perfection and performance in surfing to embracing adventure surfing.

• Aaron explains how their background in philosophy helped them reframe their relationship with surfing, allowing them to enjoy the sport in a new way.

Longevity and Surfing

• Aaron and Michael discuss the concept of longevity in relation to surfing, exploring how the sport can contribute to a longer and healthier life.

• They mention the importance of staying active, moving through space, and adapting to the environment as key aspects of living well and potentially extending lifespan.

• Aaron shares their interest in longevity biohacking and the philosophical ideas behind it, drawing parallels between the principles of longevity and the joy of surfing.

• They emphasize the value of finding joy and meaning in the present moment, rather than solely focusing on the promise of a longer life.

Meaning of Life and Surfing

• Aaron provides a philosophical perspective on the meaning of life, suggesting that it lies in the stories we tell about our experiences and how they reconcile us to being alive.

• They draw a connection between the meaning of life and the act of surfing, highlighting the attunement and skillful activity involved in the sport.

• Aaron explains how surfing satisfies both the animalistic need to move and attune with nature, as well as the human desire for music, dance, and connection with larger things.

• They discuss the social aspect of surfing and how it contributes to a sense of community, serendipity, and the feeling of belonging.

God and Surfing

• Aaron shares their definition of God, drawing from Spinoza's perspective that God and nature are one and the same.

• They suggest that through skillful activities like surfing, individuals can gradually get closer to nature and, therefore, closer to God.

• Aaron emphasizes that surfing is not purely selfish but rather an attunement to larger things, including the natural world and the ocean.

• They discuss the idea of self-transcendence in surfing, where the value of the activity goes beyond personal performance and connects individuals to the excellence of the waves and the craft of surfing.

Selfishness and Surfing

• Aaron challenges the notion that surfing is purely selfish, arguing that it involves attuning to the natural world and experiencing the waves in a harmonious way.

• They differentiate between innocent self-love and status consciousness, suggesting that the latter is the root of many social ills and vices.

• Aaron discusses the dynamics of the surfing lineup, where surfers may compete for waves and status, leading to conflicts and dominance relations.

• They emphasize that true enjoyment of surfing comes from valuing the activity for its own sake and finding joy in others' success, rather than solely focusing on personal gain or status.

Transcription

Aaron James
Think about it in terms of attunement. It's a skillful activity, and what you're going for is attunement with the wave. But the way we do that is by constantly automating certain skills and paying attention to new challenges. And that's the way we stay attuned and develop our skillful practice. And one version of it is you're trying to be the best surfer you can be, but it doesn't have to be that at all. It can just be switching up challenges and trying different things. So I decided to redefine a different way of surfing, which has its own standards. I just worked that out for myself. And I call that adventure surfing. And the goals there are just connect, just be out in the water, be in the ocean, surf beautiful places with light crowds and interesting, tricky, difficult waves.

Michael Frampton
Welcome back or welcome to the Surf Mastery Podcast. The podcast that helps passionate, lifelong surfers to catch more waves, surf with more speed, style, grace, and to have wisdom and confidence in the water. I am your host, Michael Frampton, and today's episode is a special one. You just heard a couple of quotes from it. That's Aaron James, or I should say Professor Aaron James. He is a professor of philosophy. He is an author. I will have links to his Amazon, Surfing with Sartre, among others. Aaron is a very good surfer and he spent decades chasing perfection in the water, from Lower Trestles to Indonesian surf trips. But in recent years, his relationship to surfing, just like mine, shifted quite a lot. He is no longer trying to find the perfect wave or seeking performance, but instead embraces what he calls adventure surfing, which is a mindset that values connection and attunement over competition or dominance and putting pure stoke before social status. And in this conversation we explore how surfing shapes our lives, our philosophy and even our longevity. We talk about one's surfing philosophy and how it's the foundation of your surfing experience in the water and even how it affects your performance. Is the surfing that you do coming from you, or is it influenced by the surfing industry and the surf media? Are you a product of surfing as a sport, or are you a creative surfer seeing surfing as an art form? We take a deeper dive into this and we talk about why surfing is so meaningful. We talk about how surfing not only satisfies our animalistic, primal nature, the need to move through and attune to the environment, but to our higher selves, our spiritual selves and our desire to connect to something bigger than ourselves. We liken surfing to music and dance. We discuss the meaning of life and of course the meaning of surfing. We touch on the concept of God and how surfing can bring you closer to God, why surfing is not a pointless activity or selfish pursuit, but can actually be selfless and an expression of something deeply human and transcendent. We dive into the dynamics of the lineup, the democracy of—or the lack of—in surfing, the psychology of dominant surfers, and how lineup hierarchy shapes our experience in the water. And finally we talk about learning to love surfing simply for the love of surfing and finding your own unique way of enjoying the waves without it being dictated by internal or external pressures and expectations. So if you've ever experienced shame and frustration with surfing, if you've questioned your relationship to surfing, if you've wondered whether you're chasing the right goals in the water, or you just love thinking about surfing in a deep way, this episode is for you. This episode will definitely get you thinking, and I have created this mini eBook as a workbook to help guide you through developing your own personal surfing philosophy, and it's available on my website, surfmastery.com. Not only is it a great companion with practical exercises to go alongside this episode, but it's a great way to support this show itself because it's only the price of a cup of coffee. So go to surfmastery.com and check that out. Another way to support the show is to share this episode with a friend. And without further ado... I give you my conversation with philosophy professor Aaron James. Hey, how are you?

Aaron James
Yeah, pretty good, thanks for accommodating the time change. I had to get the tide window on my spot. Oh, really narrow tide window. What's your podcast about? What's the idea?

Michael Frampton
The Surf Mastery Podcast, it's inspiration and education for better surfing performance and longevity. That's the tagline. Oh, wow. Okay. Wow. I'm super into longevity stuff. I started the show like 10 years ago where I was really interested in shortboarding and learning how to do a better turn and get barreled. And since then life is... that was when I was living in Australia. I lived—we spent four years surfing Little Doom, living in Malibu as well. Oh, okay. Got three kids now, been through a lot, lost a wife, lost a job back in New Zealand. So surfing has—the show's become quite eclectic and it's more about what's your relationship with surfing, and how does surfing affect your life, and how does it make it better or worse, and that sort of stuff. Yeah.

Aaron James
My relationship to it has changed in the last year or so.

Michael Frampton
Tell me about that.

Aaron James
Oh yeah, sure. So I spent, from my teens on—so now I'm 53—so for over 30 years, I was doing what I call perfection and looking for perfect waves. And performance. Perfection and performance, trying to perform in perfect, as good waves as I can get, right? So, became a good surfer, surf traveled my whole life, went to all the hot, the highest points. Started going to Indo a month every year, but other good world-class spots. I'm an academic, a professor, so we have our calendar. We have a lot of free time, totally free and flexible time. So, it totally accommodates surf travel easily. So, I've done that the whole, since my twenties. Since I was in grad school, even college. But then I just got to—and then at home, the way to finesse living in Southern California was, as you know, the crowds. Look at the good wave, too crowded. Surfrider Malibu is a nightmare. I made Lower Trestles my home, really got it wired. I know everybody, and I just sort of grasped the nettle and just learned to get good waves at a lot of good waves, the most crowded. I've learned. So I did that for 20 years, and then I just got burnt out, totally burnt out finally on it after about 20 years of doing that. And then I was going for over a decade to Nias for a month at a time. I throw in some Mentawais and Bali also, but I got burnt out on surfing Lagundri Bay. But I really was really dedicated for a decade.

Michael Frampton
Yeah, I've seen footage of you absolutely ripping out there. I've seen the footage.

Aaron James
Oh, cool. Thanks. Yeah. So I did that and I just cut—I mean, it was just... it's partly like, it's harder to keep up the level of performance. You're always, you're kind of sliding and then you're trying to make up the deficit, and the downward trend is—the trend is down, but you're trying to keep the slope as gentle as possible. And that was like a goal. It was fine. I did that for, still did that for a decade. And I'm still proud of myself and still had sessions that are really the peak of my life and surfing career. But I just got so over the crowd, the usual crowd dynamics and stuff. You know, originally inspired a book—that's called Assholes. I have a theory about assholes inspired by surfers, probably. And some of my colleagues in academia and surfers, but like surfers did it really well. And every surfer knows the asshole in the lineup really well. So I just got totally burned out on the whole thing. I just didn't feel like surfing Lowers. I didn't care about surfing Lagundri Bay. It's fine to go into the Mentawais, like less crowded zones or whatever. But the thing that I—and it took me a little while there to sort of figure out—to redefine. I feel like you don't discover the fountain of youth—this is a longevity point—you don't discover the fountain of youth and just decide to just not go drink from it anymore. You know what I mean? So it's like all these sort of incredible benefits from surfing—this effortless fitness and health and great attitude towards life comes, all this existential balm and all these good things just come if you just stick with surf, if you just surf. Or live your life around it. So it's pretty stupid to just not surf. So it was like, that was... and it had never been thinkable. I didn't ever live that way. So I—but I didn't know how to renegotiate my relationship to it. Trying to figure out how to do that. But it helped, I sort of redefined. So for the first time in my life, I rethought of what I was doing before was... it's not just any kind of surfing. It's not just surfing. It's specific surfing, specific goals—getting the best waves you can and surfing as well as possible. It's perfection, performing. That was the abiding goal. And I decided there's lots of different kinds of surfing and I can do a different kind of surfing, which has different goals and different standards of success. So if I do a different kind of surfing, I'm not doing a shitty job of surfing. I'm just not doing perfection and performance. I'm not doing that. There's a different game, right? It's not—if you change the game, you're not doing bad moves in the other game, or change the dance, you're not doing bad moves in a different dance. You're just doing a different dance, right? Or different game. So I decided to redefine a different way of surfing, which has its own standards. And I just worked that out for myself. And then I call that adventure surfing. And the goals there are to connect, just be out in the water, be in the ocean, surf beautiful places with light crowds and interesting, tricky, difficult waves. Like where there's a little bit of a challenge, just something interesting about it. You're out surfing, but there's like a weird reef that doesn't break that often, barely surfs, but you're the only one on it, but you're getting it wired, you know, kind of thing. The regular spot I surf now at Crystal Cove, I used to walk my dog there every day before I went to Lowers, and I'd call it the shit wave because I was like, what's that? Because I just—just shows my attitude towards it. Now I surf the shit wave all the time. I don't call it the shit wave anymore. But it has a fun—it's a reef with a fun bowl. So I've got this bowl really wired. So now, and it's kind of—and I like the wonkiness of it. And it can be fun. And I'm not trying to—I don't get the same open face and do the same open face turns like you can do at Lowers on every wave, but that's not the goal, right? So the goal is just to get the interesting waves, to just try out new things, be on it when the window's on. And then it's never that crowded. It's totally beautiful place. It's incredibly—and that's the closest place to my house anyway. So it's super easy. And then it turns out at Crystal Cove, in winter, and summer too, there's some spots that get really, really good occasionally. And a lot of people who don't check it all the time don't score it. So now I get those spots when they're on. And so I've kind of recreated this different way of surfing, but it's... like my friends who know me, knowing how I lived and how I surf, they kind of look at it like, "What? You surf out there? Oh, just a little left? Just that left?" They go over and over. They don't get it. But I'm like, it's a different thing. Anyway, so now I brought back the sort of childlike teenage joy of surfing back. I was just so stoked to surf again. And there's less sort of chase about it. I mean, as usual, I have to wait and stuff for waves, but there's less like... the thing that kind of becomes more palpable as you're chasing waves is you're waiting ever longer, it's harder and harder to score, your standards go up because you surf a lot of perfect waves. And then it's not just any good waves, it's—these are the most perfect, perfect waves you've ever... and then you see all the times the waves—now you see all the waves you're not surfing all the time. So no matter how styled out you are as a traveling pro, you're missing waves somewhere. So there's this whole kind of cruel... it's made the chase aspect harder. And then Lowers got worse because I used to surf a certain window where I could get it relatively crowded, and then the cam kind of screwed up that window. And then the professionalization culture and then the e-bikes and all this stuff just kind of screwed it all up. So it's a nightmare now. I mean, I love it. I love the place and I'm grateful for it. But yeah, so I've totally renegotiated now. It's a totally different kind of surfer. I just don't have any temptations for Lowers. Even though I check it, will see it occasionally, but I just... it's fine. Or even go back to Lagundri Bay where I don't have any temptation—just inclination. I'd want to go to other spots. They could be lesser waves, but just less crowded.

Michael Frampton
I love that. I can relate to it a lot because that basically describes my relationship with surfing now.

Aaron James
Oh, okay. Right.

Michael Frampton
And it's been like that for the past sort of five years. It kind of happened when I was living—and I spent, you know, a good four years living in Australia—shortboarding, wanting to get better at the performance style of surfing, traveling to Indo, and then living in Malibu. Tried longboarding First Point and shortboarding Zuma, and traveling down to Nicaragua. And then I surfed with Devon Howard one day out at Little Doom.

Aaron James
And I know him from Lowers. Yeah.

Michael Frampton
Yeah.

Aaron James
Yeah.

Michael Frampton
He had quite a profound influence on me and suggested, well, why don't you get a glider? He just saw the way I was surfing and what I—the kind of waves I was looking for—and he's like, why don't you get a glider? I went down to San Diego and got an 11-foot glider off Josh Hall. And then that is the board that I've been riding ever since. And I'm just looking for little unique waves that are hard to surf or getting it and just surfing away from crowds.

Aaron James
Yeah.

Michael Frampton
Yeah. And I love it.

Aaron James
That's really cool. Yeah.

Michael Frampton
Back to the simple joy of surfing and not—

Aaron James
Exactly.

Michael Frampton
I think it's still a pursuit of surf mastery because there's a different kind of challenge within that.

Aaron James
Yeah.

Michael Frampton
I'm a big believer of any sort of relationship—whether it be with a human or the ocean—if it's not growing, it's dying. It has to be growing in some way. And surf mastery doesn't necessarily mean I'm trying to master surfing. It's just the path of improving in some way, whether that be mastering a different board or learning how to ride smaller waves, or even just maintaining your surfing standards as you age is a form of that.

Aaron James
Yeah. I think about it in terms of attunement. It's a skillful activity and what you're going for is attunement with the wave. But the way we do that is by constantly automating certain skills and then paying attention to new challenges. And that's the way we stay attuned and develop our skillful practice. And one version of it is you're trying to be the best surfer you can be, but it doesn't have to be that at all. It can just be switching up challenges and trying different things.

Michael Frampton
Yeah.

Aaron James
But yeah.

Michael Frampton
There's something you said there—you said, I don't know if you used the words specifically—but you changed your surfing philosophy, let's say. Is that something that you sat down and thought about intentionally? How important is that process?

Aaron James
I don't know how other people go do it, but I'm a philosopher, so I'm a cogitator. So I use my philosophical skills. I mean, the skills really helped me. So I defined the old thing I was doing—the old activity. At that point, I said I had internalized the standards of that activity. So I had a hard time shaking the feeling that anything I was going to do was just going to be an inferior version. It was going to be—I was doing shitty surfing, a shitty surfer, low standards, subpar crap waves, not surfing well. I had to sort of—it takes a certain amount of reframing, intellectual and cognitive reframing, to think, no, wait, those are good standards for a different activity. But then that fills up with thought. It's like, but if you're doing a different activity, it can have its own standards. And then you don't apply the standards across. You don't judge pop music by the standards of whether Vivaldi and Mozart are great classical music. You're just judging apples and oranges. If you say, no—if you ask what's the best song or who's the best musical artist ever—that's not even an intelligible question. You could be asked, what are the most important genres of music? But then you're going to say, well, there's classical and then there's jazz and that kind of thing. But these just have—they're different types of things. So you assess them by their own standards. And it's not clear, if you're just talking about music period, if there's any set of standards that are specific enough to just sort of pick out the supreme form of music. I mean, some people have those views, but it's fairly silly. You're just saying, no, look, it's Beethoven's Ninth. That's the pinnacle of music.

Michael Frampton
Surfing is far more like music than it is like tennis.

Aaron James
Yeah. There are a lot of different kinds of surfing and they're all good in their own very different ways, and you assess them by the standards appropriate to the genre of surfing. So those kinds of thoughts—what I had to go through to just feel differently about this new thing I was doing. Because then when I had a thought like, oh, well, no, these are shitty waves—no, that's not. This is successful adventure surfing. This is good adventure surfing. I'm doing well. This is a goodness of a kind. Really rethinking that then freed me up to just enjoy it for what it is. And suddenly I had all the affect—just the pure stoke coming back and connecting to the sublimity and beauty of it. The stuff that really, you know, that surfers know but don't really talk about that much. But that's what stoke is all about—being caught up in the confluence of skill and changing circumstance. That's the way I think about it abstractly, but that's what stoke is about. And it just brought all that back. All that sort of sense of things came flooding back.

Michael Frampton
Yeah.

Aaron James
I already had that broad idea of what surfing is, even though when I was still in the perfection performance mode, but there was further intellectual work to do to reframe it. But then once I thought it through, I just felt permission to go and just enjoy—just never go to Lowers anymore and just surf Crystal Cove every day. And just whatever. I don't care if my friends think that I'm doing something dumb. I'm really stoked. I'm down there by myself surfing fun waves. I'm like, what do I care? It's beautiful. I'm having a totally pure surfing experience, doing the same thing I loved when I was 12.

Michael Frampton
Sounds like the adventure surfing is as much of a journey within as it is without.

Aaron James
Well, it was for me to get to there—to start to that. Yeah. I mean, where it goes, I guess, the adventure surfing might require doing some adventure—actual exploring weird waves, you know.

Michael Frampton
Every wave is different. So it's always—if you're trying to get closer to the center of now and be present, then that's part of the adventure, right?

Aaron James
Well, some people could do adventure surfing and never have done anything else and never really thought about it. That's just the thing they always did, and that's the thing they were always at peace with. And they always loved surfing. And they never had to think, rethink it. Or they just saw the other things as forms of surfing that never had any appeal or whatever. So they could be at adventure surfing but totally unreflective about it. So there was never any internal journey. They just fell into it. Sorry, I'm a philosopher, so I think that's a possibility. But for me, making a transition from one kind to another—or at least having a new kind, different kinds of surfing within a repertoire—that did require an internal change of really a journey of rethinking things. And then it was a journey too. Yeah. I mean, it was a journey for me intellectually to rethink that.

Michael Frampton
Do you think that all of your background in philosophy helped you to do that process? And are there specific questions that you'd ask yourself when you're developing a personal philosophy that crossover to developing a surfing philosophy?

Aaron James
Uh, yeah. The thing that philosophy makes you good at is identifying assumptions that you're making or other people are making, and then thinking about, wait a minute—is that true? What would it be for it to be different? What's the best way of thinking about things such that that's not true? And then what are the merits of it? And oftentimes that's really not obvious to yourself or to others, and you have to really think that through. And I do that all day long professionally for academic work, and I've done that now for decades. So that's a big part of my life. But I don't often need to do it that much. I didn't have to rethink—I mean, there were some adjustments in my earlier relationship to surfing, but it was still within the same sort of frame, form of surfing. And I made adjustments to it, and there were lots of frustrations that came out of that. But the frustrations I always found ways to manage. They never rose to sort of needing to rethink the entire enterprise that I was taking for granted.

Aaron James
I never did that before. But it was only once there was sort of a crisis, a personal crisis, which is—I suddenly just don't... can't... I just hate this now, you know?

Aaron James
Okay, wait a minute. And then the crisis was, well, I don't want to just quit surfing, you know, for the reasons I was saying, so how do I reconcile? And that was not obvious. In the way you're working on an intellectual problem, oftentimes you just pose the question—oh, well, look, here's another way of thinking. It's just obvious to you, or you're having—I'm having a discussion with someone else, and especially if you know the terrain and they're making certain assumptions, it's just obvious to you that they're making assumptions. Something you just point out. And then that wasn’t obvious to me. It took a while to figure out. I had to sort of just stare blankly, and not know. But I guess the way that being a professional philosopher, a skilled trained philosopher helped me too is I thought, well, I’ll just wait, you know, I’ll wait. I’m just going to think, I’m going to try to think about this. I’m going to wait and see—see if something comes to me to think through this more, you know, wait, try to understand what’s bothering me, what are the alternative ways of thinking about that, gradually letting myself be patient with that process as opposed to just being rash and shutting it down, just quitting and doing something else. But good. Yeah, no, it’s helped. It’s really been good. I didn’t go to Indo this year. I went to South Africa to see a friend, and we just surfed the Durban South Coast and a bunch of adventurous waves. I was doing adventure surfing there. So it was—I’ve been there before, but this was like—and I didn’t really care about scoring. It gets really, really good there. And we got good waves, but not anything like what it really—how it gets. But I was like, this is fine. This is adventure surfing. This is what I want, you know, so that was cool. So it still applies to travel and stuff. Well, it’s really freeing because you just don’t need to score perfect waves all the time. Yeah, you can just find a cool little cranny and go get it, get it wired. And anyway, so yeah, is this—this sounds up your alley? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I was intrigued by the longevity stuff, because I do have a bunch of ideas. I’m into the longevity biohacking stuff. I’m thinking of working some of that into a book project as well. Like, so I have some ideas about that.

Michael Frampton
More philosophical, like the Dave Asprey sort of world?

Aaron James
That world, yeah. I don’t take him very seriously, but other—David Sinclair at Harvard Medical School, who I think is a more philosophical kind of researcher, Peter Attia, who’s a more hardcore wet blanket kind of guy. He’s a wet blanket. I mean, I like those two. I trust both those guys, and they have philosophical differences. And there's a kind of interesting difference in how they think about longevity, you know? And I think there's things you can say philosophically about how to finesse it that kind of connect to surfing as well.

Michael Frampton
I just recently read a book—the title escapes me—about how the brain gets better as you age. And another one by a Harvard professor, female psychology professor, I forget her name, talking about basically the extreme version of the placebo effect.

Aaron James
Oh, okay.

Michael Frampton
Fascinating books and backed up by studies as well. Yeah, one study in particular where she put a bunch of 80-year-old men into a house where everything in the house was dated 30 years ago. And they were only allowed to talk about things as if it was the present tense.

Aaron James
I think I heard this. Yeah.

Michael Frampton
And their vision improved, and their walking improved, their health markers improved just simply by that. So I think, yeah, longevity has to do with the state of mind as well as—

Aaron James
Yes.

Michael Frampton
—as well as—

Aaron James
The social contact, the social context, and what's taking—That might be like, yeah, I think that's part of why some of the Blue Zone communities—why people do well—because it has to do with people being like, everyone’s old and kind of on the same page but still being active and social. And there’s still a lot of present-oriented things to live for that are joyful, exciting, lots of opportunities for social connection, doing things together. You know, about walking, games—sort of the way that surfers get together chatting out in the lineup. It’s all about like, the timeframe shrinks. Because it’s not like you’re six months, one year, two years. You know, it’s all like, what was it like at low tide? Maybe it’ll be better tomorrow. You know, it’s all really short—within hours or days. You know, the last one was so good—if it was really good as well, that might be point of conversation, but otherwise it’s like, last—well, you know, everyone’s like—is it—you know, it’s like days out or whatever. You know, like, the window shrinks really well. I think I’ve always thought of that as a big part of why surfing—it draws you into a present, a really narrow timeframe. That’s why—part of why it’s joyful, the social side of it. One of the philosophical thoughts—I mean, like in the David Sinclair—he’s got sort of a theory about why longevity work might work.

So the—I really like this idea. The idea that the commonality for what makes exercise so good, and—but also fasting—and also, why are all those things—why do these things work in terms of promoting lifespan, healthspan? They work because they’re putting stress on the body and on the cells, right? And so they’re—basically your cells, when stressed, when they’re not too comfortable—because you feel like you’ve got food, or—then they’re forced to make do with what they’ve got. Repair themselves. Use the lower quality proteins, synthesize that stuff, stuff like that. So the cells—like—and the different—and so you can stimulate that with the—best thing is exercise. Fasting is good. But then you can also do it with supplements and stuff. But this is all still pretty—supplements—but this is why I like—I mean, sorry, it’s pretty speculative in the sense that it’s like a nice theory and it’s a philosophical—it’s a theory and there’s a philosophical thought. And which is tied to like the idea that, well, maybe if the science progresses quickly enough, then—if you get on the bandwagon doing these sort of speculative biohacks, then you’ll stay ahead of the learning curve. And then maybe you can get not just like an extra six years, but you get an extra 10, 20 years of lifespan or whatever. Maybe even potentially could be even longer if you’re resetting the body clock or something like that. So this is all totally pie in the sky—not even in a bad sense—it’s a philosophical idea about like, that mortality is not as fixed as we think, right? And that there’s a value in trying to shoot for as long. And there’s a risk proposition. It’s like, the value of living longer is so great that it’s worth taking—even stuff that has a low probability of working. So there’s a lot of philosophically there. And so what I like about—what I like about Peter Attia is he’s just—he has a very different philosophical view, right? His idea—he’s Mr. Cold Water. He’s like, look, if you just look at what we already know, then none of these supplements really are going to make—we don’t know they make any real difference. They might. He says, look, it’s exercise. And it’s certain kinds of exercise. That’s the only thing that we know moves the needle on longevity, like by randomized control trials, good high-quality studies. The rest is super speculative.

And David Sinclair’s message is, “Well, I do a little weight lifting like once a week. I do a little exercise for a few hours, but mostly I just fast and take pills. And that’s how to live long and age backwards.” And Attia’s good point is like, look, if you just do that stuff, you’re not doing the thing that we already know—we already know promotes longevity, which is exercise. And it’s not any exercise. It’s exercise that promotes strength over time to prevent you from falling down while walking down a stair or a curb. Because that’s a killer. And if you survive, the recovery can be—that you’ve got to stop that. So you need strength training. And then after that, you need VO2 max. You need to get your capacity to process oxygen. And what does that is sitting on an exercise bike for three hours a week, right? And maybe a little high-intensity interval training can help.

The low-hanging fruit is the stuff we already know works.

Aaron James
And that’s just exercise—doing certain things, exercise regime. If you’re not doing that, you’re not serious about longevity. There’s a way—one way of thinking about the stuff that—that—this is going to connect—this is a long way around to a point we were making earlier in connection with surfing. So here’s my thought. So there’s something in between there, which is like—you don’t have to do a risk—you take a risk calculation now on the bet of longevity or some extra big boom in lifespan—big extra lifespan. But you also don’t have to think all you’re doing is eking out a few extra years doing arduous things now.

There’s a way of thinking about this, which is—what’s the value of living longer—a long life? Well, it’s that you’ve lived a life. What is it to be a living thing? Think about this. You’re an animal. Okay, what is it to be an animal? Well, like at the lowest level—what is it to be a living thing—is like at the cell level. It’s to be a thing that—it’s to be a thing that has a—there’s a boundary between what’s inside of it and outside of it, like membrane walls. And it moves through space. And it adapts to its senses and adapts to its surroundings. And it internalizes—it takes in resources from that to create energy to move through space. So it’s basically something like a relatively self-contained body that senses environment to move through space. So it’s movement—is the—is like the very essence—to be—as an animal. Like, that is what it is to be an animal. An animal is just a self-moving creature. Being self-moving just—it is what it is to be an animal.

And so what it is to live a biological life or be a biological animal just is to be a self-reproducing being whose ongoing existence—my existence in the future only happens because right now I’m doing these things. I’m sensing an environment, responding to it, and taking in resources, converting those to energy. That’s the only way cells or any animal perpetuates itself. So that’s what it is to live—to be alive. Okay.

So now, if you think, okay, I’m an animal, what is it—I’m a human animal, what is it to do that? Well, what is it to animal? Well, what is it to animal? Well, it’s—here’s what it is. It’s to move. It’s one of the most basic things to do—to be good at animaling—to be a good animal—is to move, move around. It’s the sense in moving around an environment that’s changing. You’re sensing and responding to the environment and then you’re moving in response to it. That’s like—what it is to fundamentally do well as an animal. That’s what all animals naturally do because they’re looking for food, reproduction. But they’re like—you have to rest—but that’s a temporary state, right? And most animals don’t have chairs. It’s no surprise, on this view, that chairs are like a curse from a lifespan and healthspan point of view. A sedentary life is like a disaster.

But we—and our self-conscious—so the worst thing to do to be a—for being an animal—is to sit around a lot. But—so human beings who’ve forgotten what it is to be an animal—to do well—just decide, well, I just want to be comfortable. So I’m going to sit around a lot. I’m going to eat whatever food’s available that is not fast. I’m not going to have any feelings of scarcity. There’s not going to be—no sort of temporary food scarcity. There’s going to be—I don’t want to have to exercise. I want to be fit and live long, but if I’m going to do that, that’s just a means of getting this bigger benefit, which is longer life. Like a longer life. Okay. For a long—for living forever, I’ll—okay, maybe I can—actually, most people aren’t persuaded because they’re not going to actually do the thing—the science we already know will give you a longer lifespan. Most people aren’t going to do it.

They’re not going to get their—they’re not going to figure out their VO2 max, get up to the norm, and then ride that down doing increasingly—with increasing marginal gains in their exercise regime every year. No, almost nobody’s going to do that. Only the really hardcore people. Nobody cares about living long enough to exercise that much because they don’t really—so the idea is like—is there some other way of thinking about why you would exercise?

And the idea is—yeah, that’s what it is to live well now, today. What it is to do well today as a living human being is to move. And more—to do well—is to move in the face of challenges. Like—this is what we were talking about with surfing. So like—yeah. So it’s the skillfully navigated environment.

And now you can think of what surfing is—it’s just like a beautiful exemplification of this thing—what it is to be an animal. But it’s now being done for all kinds of reasons—not being done for food, or for sex, or for shelter, or whatever—for survival. It’s being done for the joy of it. But it’s still not sitting around just to relax, right? It’s moving. It’s acting. It’s responding, sensing, being attuned to the environment.

And so it connects and has maybe—you know, connected to larger things and—you know, all this larger meaning as well. So this is a way of thinking about what’s beautiful in surfing—it connects with not just the bigger stuff like what Freud calls “oceanic feeling,” but like just what it is to be an animal. What it is to be a living being. It’s just to move and adapt and skillfully attune to your environment.

And so the idea on the longevity thing is like—look, so here’s why you should exercise now. Here’s why you should eat well now. Here’s why you should put your body under stress by fasting, by exercising—because that’s what it is to do well now as a living being. You’re not doing that to try to get this extra 10 years, or 20 years, or 50 years of longevity. You’re doing it because this is what it is to do well now—this year—to live well now, during this week, this month, this decade. That’s living well. So, okay, I’ll do that.

And if I can see the beauty and the joy and find some way of making it fun and worthwhile for its own sake—because it’s a challenge or because it feels good or whatever—then now that’s self-sustaining. And then the idea is you could do that and keep doing that. And now if you get lucky and science—you stay ahead of the science, and science serves up some discovery such that the things you’re doing, gradually adapting to it, let you live an extra five, 10 years, 20 years—then yeah, that’s all to the good. Why not be open to that? But it’s not like you’re forcing yourself to do a bunch of shit now for this promise of a long, way extra-long life.

So I think that’s kind of like an in-between view. And then surfing is one way of thinking about how to do it. And everybody’s got to find their own surfing. But I’ve had to supplement all this—so I started supplementing with other exercise too. Surfing. So, yeah.

Michael Frampton
Yeah. One of the things about surfing is it doesn't really put much—unless you're high performance, big waves—it doesn't really put much load through the system.

Aaron James
Not enough. Not enough as you age. Yeah. But anyway.

Michael Frampton
It sounds like Attia and Sinclair should start surfing basically.

Aaron James
Yeah, I imagine Attia—maybe he would—but I don't think Sinclair would. He's just kind of—he's a scrawny guy. He's not an athletic type. He's just a nerd guy in the lab. He wouldn’t. He just does the minimum amount of exercise, hoping he can get by with fasting. I'm not saying he won't live longer or whatever—maybe he will—but...

Michael Frampton
Well, there's two ways of looking at longevity too, right? There's "let’s try and live longer," or there's "no, let’s try and get more living out of what we have."

Aaron James
Yeah. Let’s try to live. And then it just turns out that a lot of what it is to live now also will make you live longer. And that can be a welcome side effect of living well now. And that means move your ass, get off your ass, move around, find new challenges, exert yourself. You know, just what we were saying—finding new challenges. Not stagnant. Not seeking comfort. Seeking comfort, which you do more and more as you age, right? You know, because you'd be like, I'm tired. I don't have energy. What do I want to do? I want to sit around. I want to relax. And so basically that’s the curse of prosperity—the curse of affluence and prosperity—which you have in spades once you’re middle-aged and have a comfortable life. And you can find any—and even develop your maybe interest in some... I can spend all day doing philosophy without exercising or surfing or whatever. What were you going to say?

Michael Frampton
Well, I think that those who seek comfort for comfort’s sake—it’s never enough. They always have to supplement it with a cocktail or some processed food or something. But if at the end of a day, you've been surfing, you've been to work, you've spent time with friends—yeah, you can sit down and relax.

Aaron James
Yeah, sure. I'm all for lazing and lounging and stuff, but like in its role. But even still, lazing and lounging can be like lazing around the house. It doesn't have to mean like sitting on the couch mindlessly scrolling through your social media feed. It can be like doing different projects around the house—trying, planting something, or something you read on social media, trying it out in the house or fixing it. And that doesn't have to be like a getting-stuff-done kind of thing. It can be you just following your attention wherever it naturally is drawn in a kind of totally free-flowing, relaxed, creative way.

Aaron James
So it doesn't have to be like a disciplined kind of thing.

Aaron James
That's really, I think, really valuable. That's a really important part of creative activity—for me anyway.

Michael Frampton
I'm gonna ask you a philosophical question. Okay. What is the meaning of life?

Aaron James
Oh, it's funny—I have an answer to this question. So it's a super simple answer. So here it is. Let me ask you this—let me put it this way first. What is it—first—so this is being a philosopher—first, let's ask a slightly different question. What is it for life to have meaning? So what is it for there to be a fact of the matter about whether life has meaning or not? What kind of fact is that—that it has meaning? Okay, so that doesn't tell you what the meaning of life is. It just tells you what kind of fact that consists of. It will point you the way to know what to look for. So here’s the answer. What it is for life to have meaning is just—for any set of events that occur—it’s for there to be a story that’s true enough, an apt story that’s true enough of those events. Okay? Okay, it's the best story of those events. So the meaning—what it is for meaning in life—is for there to be a true, apt story of the events that occurred in life. Okay, that’s partway there for meaning in life, I think. But then the other thing you need is that the story has to be a certain kind of story—not just any story. It has to be a story that has a function. It reconciles you to being alive rather than not, and to your life events having gone a certain way—having gone one way rather than another. So it’s a story you can tell that’s true and apt about a lot about the events of your life that you feel like you're glad that you lived. That was your life. You're glad to have had that life. That's what it is for it to be meaningful. It's—you can be reconciled to it. If your life is subpar—lacks meaning—if there's not enough there—you can’t be reconciled to it. Like it can be “All I did—like end of life—well, I did get a hole in one once, but I don't know if there’s any—I don’t know what my life amounts to.” Like someone at a nursing home, they're like, “What is my life?” “Well, I don’t know.” And they could go out dying kind of in despair because there’s not enough meaning there in their life, you know? But what people do when they’re finding meaning is they'll just tell stories. “Well, my kids didn’t grow up to be assholes, and my grandchildren are beautiful people.” And that's sort of—that’s the story. That’s the thing they did. That’s how they’re going to tell the story of their being a father, grandfather, grandma—kind of thing like that. Or—it doesn’t have to be about accomplishments either. It can be a story about failed efforts—what had serendipitous consequences that are interesting. That’s how I think about my midlife. So I just wrote a memoir about my forties. About my charity misadventures behind Lagundri Bay. I did a bunch of charity projects there with a local guy. And then I told the story of those things as a story of misadventure and serendipity—but not a complete success. So if you’re asking, what’s the meaning of my life? Well, what’s the best story you can tell about the events of your life? And does it let you reconcile yourself to having lived—that life? So that's it.

Michael Frampton
The meaning of life is to give life meaning.

Aaron James
Yeah. Maybe that’s—that’s way better. So far as—well, I don’t know if it’ll work for all living creatures because the other animals and all the cells and stuff aren’t storytelling creatures, right? It’s the humans that are the story—that are really prone to tell stories. It’s part of our sociality. I mean, dogs are incredibly social, but they don’t tell stories to each other. I mean, it’s part of what’s distinctly human—that we can represent the world in various ways and coordinate our different attitudes around—through language and these stories. And that’s a really, really big part of human sociality. So I think that and sort of narrative aspect of human—that is—it’s definitely part and parcel of human life. So what is it to be meaningful? It’s just like drawing from that way of being. Like what is it? You know, you’re already in on the stories. I mean, stories also have other functions other than being what constitutes meaning in life. Like explaining yourself to someone, making yourself intelligible to others, so you’re not dangerous or not too unpredictable or—you know—you could have a relationship with or be a friend. Or someone asks, “Why did you do that?” You just—you tell a story about why you did that. It could just be a rationalization, and maybe it’s not a true story. You’re just making something up on the fly, but it’s good enough in the moment to make you feel like you understand what you were doing, and that they can understand it. Maybe it’s passable, so it flies as a rationalization. But I wouldn’t call that meaning. So then bad views about meaning in life are just these—are rationalizations, right? They’re stories about life, but they’re just not—they’re not good stories. They’re not the best stories. They’re just stories that are getting told for an existential balm. You know, like, “Don’t worry, everything will work out in the end,” or something like that. What does that even mean? I don’t know if there’s really any—there’s not even any super cosmic story in which everyone—everything actually works out. I mean, like even the big one—eternal bliss in heaven for the elect—you know, like, there’s a whole crowd of people that are burning in hell. Eternal damnation doesn’t work out for those guys. Karma doesn’t work out. Like, you know, for the people that go down the hierarchy—the karmic hierarchy—they were human, then they became dogs, and then they became insects, and then they were just killed and became worms. That didn’t work. Things didn’t work out for them. So these are bad—those are—so you can criticize these. These are claims about what is meaning, but they’re not good stories that should reconcile you. So anyway, yeah, that’s my new take on that aspect of it. But actually, I don’t think that’s all of meaning. Because the basic meaning is still—the meaning of surfing is just attunement. Attunement to the world. And I think that’s a primitive. That doesn’t have to have a story to it. So the animals do that. Doesn’t have a story aspect to it. And we do make stories out of it all the time. And that’s what we’re sort of celebrating and we’re trying for.

Michael Frampton
Is the attunement of a lion have to do with surfing?

Aaron James
So the stuff I was saying about what animals do—before animals—like sensing, responding. Sensing an environment, moving through it in light of what it’s like—what opportunities for action it affords. “Affordances” is the way people talk about it. And then differentially skillfully responding to it for purposes of adaptation. So like, this is basically evolutionary stories about adaptation, about animals developing—being attuned to an ecological niche so they can survive and reproduce in it.

Michael Frampton
You saying that the act of surfing is just basically satisfying our animalistic nature?

Aaron James
I don’t think it’s—well, it depends what you mean by “basic.” If you mean something like “that’s all it is,” then I don’t think it’s all a lion is doing, or a dog is doing. I think it is what a lion is doing and an animal is doing, but it’s also something more. For example, here’s something that’s definitely attunement—and something animals don’t really have in the way humans have—music. Making music, listening to music. Me hearing a song, you hearing a song. I’m attuned to the song, you’re attuned to the song. We’re attuned to each other because we’re both listening to a song at a concert. That’s attunement. Okay? That’s human. That’s like deeply human-level attunement. That’s part and parcel of every religious tradition—music. Part of every culture—music’s really important. It’s one of the best things in life. Everyone agrees. Almost nobody hates—almost everybody loves music and thinks it’s the best. And then dancing to music is all part of this. Playing music—celebrated in the culture. So okay, what makes that meaningful? Well, there’s something that’s a distinctively human thing, but it’s still a kind of attunement. That’s like what the animal—the lion, the dog—is doing in attuning—or a worm is doing—in attuning to their environment. I still think of that as all different forms, ways that we attune, do attuning. And that’s like a master value that explains why truth is valuable, why poetic metaphor is valuable, why skillful practices are metaphor. They’re all forms of attunement. This is like a master theory of it. So that doesn’t have to be a story-based thing. That’s—call that basic meaning in life. And then—and there’s a distinctive thing that we humans do, because we’re storytelling creatures, which is we attune to ourselves and each other and the world through telling stories about the events—to make sense of them. Right? And that—I think that’s an essential part of meaning in life for people, for humans. Yeah. This is my grand theory.

Michael Frampton
Yeah, no, that's a good point. This is new, by the way, compared to—okay, it makes sense. Yeah. Because, I mean, it just—it’s more of a case for surfing, because not only does surfing satisfy that animalistic mammal that has to move in attunement with nature, it also satisfies the dancer and the musician who wants to be in sync with the sound waves of the ocean that are coming.

Aaron James
Absolutely. So it's not a surprise that surfing is all about waves, and wavelengths, and being attuned to waves—and waves, like—and so is music, and so is dancing. And it's all attunement. It's pure attunement. I mean, it's not—it's not pleasure. This is the thing to think about, the thing to get past—is not to make it too subjective, because it's not about the pleasure you get from music, or the pleasure you get from dancing, or the pleasure you get from surfing. The pleasure is, as Aristotle said, proper to a virtue. It’s proper to a skillful activity. It’s in an activity that’s a response to an environment. And the response to the environment—where you're in sync with larger things—you’re synced with wavelengths, with waves. You're harmonizing with waves and wavelengths. That's ocean waves, the way that they refract across a bottom. In a song, it’s the frequencies and the way they’re relating. In dancing, it’s moving your body in sync. These are all ways of mixing. Forms of conversation are ways we sync with each other as well. So I think these are social forms of attunement. I think that’s a master value. It’s what every religious tradition is after. What are they trying to do? It's—well, an idea of how you can commune with God or nature. I think of that as—even if they don’t use the word—if they think it's something else—they’re trying to be attuned to the world, to the larger, to the universe, or to larger things. It’s grandiose to call it the universe or whatever if you're just being a surfer, but it’s still pretty big. You're a surfer. It’s like, “I'm the ocean. Pacific Ocean.” I'm thinking about the storms circling around below New Zealand that are sending waves up to me. Same superstorm down there, sending waves up to the Indian Ocean. I just talked to my friend in South Africa—he's going to surf those waves, you know, J-Bay this week or whatever. So you’re attuned to large things. That’s the sublimity—that’s the sublime of large things in the traditional sense that sort of God is associated with. If it has to be super cosmic, like backing out, looking at the whole universe or whatever, then it's—I'm not even sure what it’s asking. It’s too—it’s getting too big or whatever. It’s getting greedy or whatever. Because the Earth isn’t big enough? Like, the Milky Way galaxy—which is a piece of shit speck of dust in the middle of nowhere from the universe—you know, but it’s like, the idea that there has to be something. But then there’s a whole set of galactic attunements that are out there too. So that’s all this bigger thing that we have some kind of cosmic place. It doesn’t have to have any further meaning other than there’s just this thing—the sublimity of it is—you know—there. We are connected. So this is what I think of as—surfing is right on the cusp there of what I like about it. This way of thinking about surfing is that it’s on the cusp of the low—what the animals, even the worm is doing—but it fits with whatever religious tradition or spiritualistic tradition is doing too, at one level of description.

Michael Frampton
Yes, not on all levels. Yeah, right.

Aaron James
I think that's the true level. The ultimate truth is that all the truth is about attunement. And why it’s valuable—that’s the ultimate truth. So that’s my own story about meaning, you know.

Michael Frampton
Is there anything that surfing can't give?

Aaron James
Yeah. I mean, it doesn't—by itself, the act of surfing doesn’t give you all the need for social connection. This is really important for humans. I mean, like—

Michael Frampton
Well, it depends on where you surf and who you surf with.

Aaron James
You have to bring friends. You know, friends have to be—I don't know—around, alive, not have family commitments, so they can post up with you in whatever sort of spot you’re in. I mean, you know, like—I mean, there’d be something lost, even if you had Tavarua all to yourself and no one was coming and you just had it for the rest of your life. Like Jon Rose. I mean, it was the resort. Say he got exclusive rights back and he just closed off everyone from being there and just decided to live solo, surf Cloudbreak. I mean, he’s—you know, it doesn't sound insane to a surfer, but like—he’s going to miss out on all the life of a surfer. And in fact, he can be there anytime, and he spends a lot of time in La Jolla, where he’s from, and he’s got relationships. So the social side of it, and all the relationships and connection to human society—man’s a social animal, like Aristotle says—and so that surfing as such doesn’t get you—like riding surfing good waves doesn’t get you that by itself. Bring your friends. Okay. But how long can your friends stay?

Michael Frampton
The car park is part of—and that's a social—yeah, I agree.

Aaron James
Yeah, I agree. So that’s a way you can sort of create little forms of society around surfing and surf breaks. And that adds a lot of meaning, I think. But that adds it in its own way. It’s sort of premised on surfing and appreciation of surfing and love of surfing, but it’s not—that’s not the act of surfing.

Michael Frampton
Just—surfing encompasses far more than the act of surfing. It’s the culture of surfing. It’s the discussions about surfing.

Aaron James
Yeah.

Michael Frampton
Yeah.

Aaron James
If you want to sweep in the whole culture of surfing—yeah. But then the point is that the culture of surfing involves a lot more that’s valuable that goes beyond the act of surfing itself. For as beautiful as it is—it is. I mean, the culture of surfing wouldn’t be cool and awesome as it is if the act of surfing weren’t this incredible thing. But it’s still not the whole thing. The sociality is just a separate thing. I mean, it’s still part of it. You can be a surfer—solo session—in the best waves of your life, and get one of the best tubes of your life, come out of the barrel and have an ecstatic sense of bliss. But then be like, “I wish somebody would’ve seen that.” “I wish I had one friend who I could even tell, like, just talk about it.” Paddle back out and go, “Oh my God.” You know, like—the best tube of your life doesn’t provide that. It doesn’t provide the social connection.

Michael Frampton
That's right. And I would hazard a guess to think that a lot of people who do surf—the social aspect of surfing might be quite a large part of that. Because they know if they’re out there at 7 a.m., that so-and-so is going to be there to catch up with. So surfing is very—it’s a unique thing for everyone. We all get different things out of it.

Aaron James
Yeah. And actually there’s a longevity connection here, by the way. This fits with why, like—just surfing and sticking with surfing—as a biohack basically, from a longevity point of view. Beyond the other reasons we mentioned—health, exercise. But the other thing that fits with the longevity studies, like the Harvard Longevity Study that tracked people over 50 years—the number one thing that correlates with longevity is incidental interactions with people that are outside their narrow circle of trust. So the second—the quality of intimate relationships—was the number two factor. And that was defined as people you were close enough to ask for a loan from. Then there’s this broader set of people. The people who live long all had—well, there's a correlation anyway—between people who live long and people who had lives rich in people they would just bump into. Could be at a coffee shop, or a third place—a library, a park, or the beach. But surfers have it in droves. They stick with a regular surf spot. They have all their friends. Chat about the waves. Surf tales. Surf stories. They’re, in effect, doing something that correlates with longevity even if they never surf. Just by being part of the regular chatting and surf culture, which is all about the love of waves. So that’s—like—it’s crazy. That’s more important, correlation-wise, than marrying the right person—that’s number two. Or having a good relationship with your kids. All these people down at the beach—the people that live surf—are in one sense—I don’t know what the causal relationship is. The longevity study won’t tell you that. But you could speculate about what it is. Maybe it’s something to do with what we were saying earlier about socializing in the Blue Zones. Something about the sense of meaning and connection and social connection and feeling like you belong—maybe that’s what it is. And that’s what surfers get all the time if you’re just participating in surf culture. And they don’t get that from just riding waves. It’s the socializing around riding waves that provides that.

Michael Frampton
But I would suspect the people who you trust enough to ask for a loan—you’d get all of that from them in a far safer way. What you’re getting from people who you don’t know that well is a little bit of mystery, a little bit of chaos, maybe even. It’s still human interaction, but there might be an element of anxiety there as well, which is a stressor. Which is, as you know, it’s like exercise—stress to the body. Maybe we need that randomness of stress as well.

Aaron James
That could be. Yeah, I don’t know. I’m thinking it’s more like the element of surprise and serendipity and the sense of life is magical. That’s what I would think of. I mean, you bump into somebody and then you don’t see them for a while, and then you thought of them, and then the next day you saw them down at the beach. “Hey, I was just thinking of you.” Like, that sense of serendipitous connection. We have a lot of meaning around that. And I think that’s—it does feel magical. But it’s also fairly predictable because it’s like a relatively set number of people showing up to the same kind of place repeatedly. You don’t predictably meet any one person, but you will encounter a lot of the different people pretty reliably over time. This is just part of the way of thinking about the value of communities organized around a life. A lot of people organize their lives around a common place. That creates a sense of community because it creates these serendipitous interactions. It’s predictable—and this is why we organize around common places—but any particular given interaction is serendipitous. And it makes for friendship. You bump into somebody three times and you’re like, “Hey, let’s go have some beers.” It even feels uncanny. It feels meant to be—and magical. There’s just a lot of ways that life feels meaningful and enchanted—just from that. Yeah. So I think that’s—you kind of belong. You feel like fortune is on your side. You belong to the world. Fortune’s on your side. Just—all these little interactions really bring a lot of meaning. Magic is the term people talk about it. But it’s not woo-woo magic. Not woo-woo magic. But it is a certain sort of magical way life can be beautiful and sublime. And yeah. So I think that’s part of it. That’s just part of the incidental friendships. So surfers are getting that. But you can get that by other sorts of relationships around common interests. But you don’t have to be in a Blue Zone or an old folks home. You’re out in nature and a beautiful place. And you know—yeah—you can do it for a long time.

Michael Frampton
You mentioned religion and God. What’s your definition of God?

Aaron James
Well, I like this—Spinoza has this kind of—it seems like he’s evasive, because he talks about “God or Nature.” He has this super surfer view. So this is Spinoza. He’s a super heterodox Jewish philosopher. Heterodox in that he’s accused of both being an atheist and a pantheist at the same time. Because what he thinks is that—it’s basically that God and nature are kind of one and the same thing. That doesn’t mean God doesn’t exist. God exists. It’s all nature. So he gets called an atheist—like, “You don’t believe in God.” He’s like, “No, no, I believe in God.” But, “Oh, you’re a pantheist.” “You mean you think everything that is, is God?” And then it’s like, maybe that’s his view. But he uses this phrase—the Latin phrase—“God or Nature.” And he’s kind of evasive about it. But his idea is that through skillful activity—including things like cooking and exercise and joyous conversations and dinner parties—by doing that, you're gradually getting closer to nature. And therefore closer to God. So you're a part—that’s like a perfection. Increasing skill in these ways—perfecting in activities—is being closer to God and closer to nature. Closer to God. And that’s all the same thing. So I think this is very surfer. Put it that way. That’s not the traditional monotheistic definition of God, on which God’s a separate and independently existing being or entity, aside from the universe, which might have existed or not.

Michael Frampton
That.

Aaron James
Was an ancient.

Michael Frampton
Way of thinking, and it's been bastardized over time as well. I think maybe they thought about it differently than we do. And I think they thought about it back then—oh, it could be closer to what you're saying now—Mother Nature. The skill thing points to maybe like, if you're getting better at something, then you're envisioning yourself as being better at that in the future. And that's what you're looking towards—is God is you tomorrow who's a little bit better than you were today.

Aaron James
Oh, okay. I'm not sure that would be—I don't know if that's Spinoza’s view anyway. But I think it’s supposed to allow the idea—I mean, it could allow the idea—that there’s some self-transcendence in the activity like that. You can think of through your activity, it's not just your own perfection that you're striving for, it's like excellence in the activity. And that's connecting you to the excellence in surfing, in waves, in riding waves. So—and there's self-transcendence—you can think the value of that goes beyond the value of your performance. And that is what surfers think. This is why you can go and hang around the car park and share the love of surfing, even if you've stopped doing it well. You have an injury, your better days are behind you. It's still not about your own perfection, but still your appreciation of the activity. I mean, a lot of times—this is a point Aristotle made—but one thing that appreciation and enjoyment of an activity often comes with is a greater level of expertise in your own skillful practice. The better you get at something, the more you often enjoy it. But on this view, it's not like—there's still an element of self-transcendence that could come from that appreciation. Becoming better and better as a writer, which is a difficult thing to do—I write—and it's a really hard thing to do. And your standards are always rising faster than your ability. You don't ever get to feel very satisfied. You might grow a lot as a writer, but what you really come to appreciate is the craft of writing, which is a longstanding human tradition and piece of culture and constantly being practiced. Appreciating other people's writing and great works of writing more than your own—something like that. You might appreciate and enjoy that as much as your own progress in writing. You know, you might take it when you can get it.

Michael Frampton
Back to surfing and God—is surfing purely selfish?

Aaron James
Oh no, no, no. I don’t think at all. I think it's about attuning to larger things in that connection.

Michael Frampton
Yeah, but that's within your own experience.

Aaron James
No, no, no. I think the value of this experience of surfing is that the surfer is attuned to the natural world—to the ocean wave formations and the bottom bathymetry and the breaking waves. They are attuned to it in a harmonious way. That’s a real fact about the world. They are experiencing it, and they are enjoying the experience of it. But the value of it is that. I mean, it wouldn't have the same value if they were just on an “experiencing surfing” experience machine—on a VR headset in a Lazy Boy. Like someone could have the qualitatively exact same experience and enjoy it, sitting in that Lazy Boy, and have all the same pleasure—but not be doing the activity. And they're not succeeding. And they’re not doing well in life in the way that the surfer is who's actually riding the wave. They’re not. They might be indistinguishable even experientially, but you're not surfing.

Michael Frampton
I can grant you that surfing a wave is less selfish than sitting in a Lazy Boy. I give you that.

Aaron James
Yeah. No, but you're trying to achieve something. I mean, it does involve you, because you're—if you're the surfer, right? You're trying to be attuned to a wave in a certain way. So that makes it self-referential partly. But that doesn't have to be really—your sense of self can also blur, as often happens on good waves. Right? You're attuned to—so as you go along the wave, you have to adjust, constantly adjust body position, and respond to the next moment of the wave—what it's doing. And you have to do that spontaneously. And that often involves drawing you out of your awareness of yourself. Like, you might think one part of your body position or another part, but in the limit—like a really good long tube—you might completely lose all awareness of yourself temporarily. But then realize—see the lip—realize you’ve got to twist or something. And then—back to total absorption. Experientially, the boundary between self and wave and world can be pretty fluid in the experience of the surfer. It's still you doing it in some sense, right? There's a surfer riding the wave. But you're doing it for surfing. And it's you surfing the wave.

Michael Frampton
Isn't surfing pointless?

Aaron James
No, surfing's worth doing for its own sake.

Michael Frampton
It makes me think of—if you're having trouble catching waves, don't try and catch the wave. Accept the wave’s invitation to dance.

Aaron James
Yeah, right. Sure.

Michael Frampton
The point I’m trying to make though, is like—it’s selfish in the terms of, when you go surfing, you’re not helping other people.

Aaron James
Okay, so yeah. So things don’t have to be—there’s altruism in the sense of altruistic motivation or altruistic actions, in which the goal is just to benefit someone else.

Michael Frampton
Society as a whole.

Aaron James
Sure. Yeah. Society, right. Contribute to society, contribute to someone else, some other person. Is there anything wrong with friends—friends doing something together because it's mutually enjoyable? Is that selfish? There's nothing selfish about that. Two friends having a nice chat. Two friends seeing a movie together. Two friends taking a walk. They're doing it because it's mutually beneficial. Is it selfish? It's not selfish. There’s nothing selfish about it. This is like a wonderful thing to do in life—for its own sake. Take a walk with friends. Chat with friends. If you're really someone's friend and you like doing stuff together, you don’t think, “Why do you do this?” “Well, because I enjoy walking with my friend.” That underscribes what you're doing. No, because talking with friends is great. It's worth doing for its own sake. We do that for its own sake. I mean, because we value friendship. We value friendship for its own sake. You value having friends. But because you value friendship for its own sake, you also value other people having friendships. So you might respect their friendships because you know what kind of value it has. Surfing—you surf for its own sake. And especially when you're the surfer. But your valuing surfing for its own sake means that you really appreciate seeing surfing done well. When your friend gets a good wave, or when a stranger gets a good wave—a stranger who’s been waiting a while finally nabs a good one—you’re like, “Yeah, good on ya.” Maybe the guy’s kind of an asshole, but you’re still like, “Yeah, I’m still happy for him. He finally got one.”

Michael Frampton
I like that. That's a good perspective.

Aaron James
Yeah. So it's not—the motives are not—I mean, there are some people who are just completely selfish surfers. That’s possible. But I don't think that's the typical motivational profile.

Michael Frampton
Yeah, no, I agree. I also think that if you're a surfer and you love surfing, if you make surfing one of the priorities in your life, you're actually a better person in every other aspect of your life. You're a better husband, you're a better worker, et cetera, as well. It's not selfish in that way as well.

Aaron James
Okay. Yeah. So those are side effects. I mean, there’s one way of thinking about it, which is they’re side effects—like, you're more easygoing and you're more relaxed, you’re less stressed out. And so you’re better able to fulfill other obligations or provide benefit to other people or society. I think that's real. But I think there might be something more than just accidental side effects. I mean, being a surfer means loving surfing and caring about something for its own sake, and engaging life for its own sake in a really robust way. That’s itself really valuable. And that lets you be the kind of person who engages other things in that same way. Like, you're good—you can get—because you know stoke as a surfer, you can get stoked about lots of other things. Surfers get stoked about lots of things. They’re just prone to get stoked about stuff. I mean—not things like arduous labor or whatever—but surfers are like the kind of people who can find a lot of joy and stoke in activities. I mean, a lot of surfers take to golf. I don't know—maybe there's a lot of similarities in the body movement or it’s individualistic or something like that. It's not just incidental. It’s a way of valuing activities or a way of valuing life or engaging life that flows over immediately to all kinds of other ways of doing other things, including being in a relationship—being a lover or a friend. You can be really stoked for somebody else’s—stoked to serve them or help them or support them or whatever. Contribute to them. Invest in them. Really stoked about that in a way that’s—it can be totally altruistic, where the boundary between self and other doesn’t really matter that much. And you might be that kind of person precisely because you’re the kind of person who values surfing. And the boundary between self and wave blurs there too. And you have a sense that that’s a supremely beautiful thing to do in life. So you do it. You do it in a partnership as well. Yeah. So I think that—I don’t know. That’s a little bit more than just sort of an accidental battery—accidental connection. Surfing really recharges the batteries, and now I have more energy for other things. It's not just instrumental. There’s still a way of valuing activities. It’s like you're doing the same thing as surfing at one level when you're doing these other things. A way of living life.

Michael Frampton
I've never thought of it like that. I like that though. You must have some different thinkings and definitions on what selfishness itself is.

Aaron James
Oh, yeah. I do, in the sense that I think—the one that comes up pretty significantly in this—well, here I like Rousseau. Rousseau was a pioneering philosopher on this that had huge influence on psychology and stuff. So he thinks there’s one form of caring about yourself that’s just totally innocent. It’s just the way every animal cares about themselves. You're looking out for your own. You feed yourself. You shelter. You do things that you need to survive. And that’s what he calls amour de soi—it’s French, you know? And then there's a different thing. A different thing, which is of caring about yourself—is what we might call status consciousness. Or he calls amour-propre. That’s caring about how you measure up in the eyes of other people. And especially—how you rank relative to other people. So that you are either superior or inferior. There’s this comparison and status between you and others. Rousseau’s big idea is that this innocent thing that we do—the animal self, innocent kind of self-love—is fine. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s totally natural, normal, healthy. This other thing—amour-propre, status consciousness—is the root of all evil. It’s the root of all evil in social relations and our personal vices. It ruins us and makes us unhappy. It ruins social relations. It makes democracy impossible. It’s the cause of political evil. So he’s got this robust story about this. And by the way, this is his early work—his Second Discourse on Inequality. This story is where he first told this. And there’s a later book called The Social Contract, which was the first modern version of democracy that in fact had a big influence in Europe and instigated the French Revolution and then the American Revolution. So it actually—well, just really quickly—the idea of his, one way of thinking about his idea of democracy was that it answers to this fundamental form—way that we’re self-conscious. It solves that problem. Our status consciousness means—it’s basically an unstable—normally an unstable—situation. Because if we're competing for status, there's no way—like, I always have to rank myself. I can't love myself unless I rank myself as your superior. You can't love yourself unless you rank yourself as my superior. Or if you do accept yourself as my inferior, then you're living in dejection. You can't love yourself that way. You're conflicted. So all these evils and vices come out of this kind of status relation. But there's a solution. There's a way out of the status contest. And that’s to have a form of political community—democracy—in which everyone is sort of regarded as an equal. So at one level, we're all political equals. We have a republic of equals. Everyone gets a say in our political decisions at one level—our rights. And our rights and freedoms and prerogatives are all the same. And we all count as equals in that regard. So it confines our status contest to, like, who’s a better surfer, who’s a better artist, who has more money. It kind of contains the problem. That's the idea. That’s his idea of why democracy could last, when it never had in the past. And, so far, we’re doing the world’s longest historical experiment. We’re seeing how long it can last. And it’s on the ropes, right? Not the experiment, but… But that’s the big idea. But you see it in droves—the status consciousness in the surfing lineup. So this isn’t just about the act of surfing the wave, but it’s surfers competing for waves in the lineup. A lot of what they’re competing over is—well, just to get a wave—but it’s also about their status position in the lineup. Whether they’re getting the respect they think they deserve—either as a local, or whether they’re getting enough good waves, or whether they’re getting their fair share. And then they go to blows and fight—fight over this. What do surfers fight about? I mean, they pass all the time on good waves and let the other guy go if it's the other guy’s right of way—showing respect. But they go to blows and have fights—altercations over perceived violations of the rules of right of way—all the time. And what are they fighting for there? Well, it’s for status and respect. They’re trying to exact respect from the others. They’re in a status contest, because they’re not going to give it to you. Who belongs? Who’s really an equal? Localism is about creating a hierarchy. “We’re not all equal. Some pigs are more equal than others.” To put it in terms of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, “All pigs are equal, and some pigs are more equal than others.” You know? Like, “All surfers—surfing is for everyone. The beach belongs to everyone.” And “Some surfers are more equal than others,” meaning, “We have a right to whatever waves we want, and then you just get the scraps.” And then amongst the people within the hierarchy, they might have their own pecking order. That’s all about status. That’s a social hierarchy that’s run on status. Now, I think that leads to a lot of behavior that is totally self-regarding and self-interested. But what people are fighting for is not just getting more waves. Because somebody might still fight, even though they just got a shit-ton of really good waves. And they might even be tired. They don’t need another wave, as it were. They’re not even that worried about it. But they’re still worried about defending their position in the hierarchy. So they might still not let someone go, or call the other person off, exercise their local prerogatives to just get a good one—or get another good one, yet another. And they know everyone else is human, because they get—“This guy just got another fucking good one.” But he doesn’t care, because he’s like, “Yeah, you bet. You deserve it. You’re beneath me. Get used to it.” That might be his point. That’s why he takes off. And so dominance relations can be a big part of surfer motivation. Surfers will go out and say they want to go dominate. They want to go get a lot of waves and dominate. So that’s way more than self-interested. That’s not just for the love of waves. That’s not just wanting to get your share. It’s not just ego. It’s not just egoistic. It’s of a deeper, darker kind of thing that’s behind a lot of life’s social, society’s social ills and vices.

Michael Frampton
And so I think—

Aaron James
That Rousseau story works for the surfing lineup. Like, it works really well.

Michael Frampton
The dominance—do you think that stems from caring what other people think?

Aaron James
Yeah. I mean, it does in the sense—I mean, in different ways. It's not just vanity, wanting to be seen for being, you know, beautiful, good surfer or whatever. It's wanting to be seen as having your proper place in the hierarchy recognized. So if someone's a top dog—wanting to be seen as top dog, right? And that’s what they call getting respect they deserve, their due, getting their propers, right? That’s what they’ll fight for. They're going to fight to not lose dominance. You know, if they were previously dominant—like local—and they're starting to lose their ability, they can't surf as well, then they might become more of a barking dog. They're not giving up. This is like the silverback who's being chased. This is more of the animal kingdom. Higher apes do this in droves. This animal kingdom behavior—it does apply over. But in humans, it takes a more insidious form because we tell all these rationalizing stories about why we're entitled. "You know, I live here, la la la. I've been surfing here 40 years, la la la. I'm the better surfer, la la la." We make all these stories up, right? And some of them might have only the slightest real justification, and the rest is just rationalization. I think there's something to say for localism—the people that have invested a lot of time in a break, they know how the break works, and they have a stake in preserving it so that it's protected and preserved. And there are ways it can be degraded, and they have a stake in that. And they're often the ones that are best positioned to know what orderly wave sharing looks like. And so they often should have more authority in disputes about what that is. Those are sort of fair prerogatives that locals—people who surf somewhere a lot—have. Okay, local privilege goes way beyond all those sort of good justification.

Michael Frampton
Yeah, it's complex. Just preserving healthy order, yeah.

Aaron James
And it's all these complex stories which we tell ourselves to go so far as to justify violence. Local guys justifying violence—like literally going and kicking someone's ass, or ganging up on some surfer, or having a fight in the water. So then that goes pretty quickly to a lot of what—humans—that's not animals hurting each other either, because animals do hurt each other, but often they mostly avoid each other, or they hurt each other—sometimes there's a prey relationship and sometimes it's status—but humans go out of their way. Humans go out of their way to kill each other at great cost to themselves. And the murder rate around the world is mostly men killing men—mostly. And in one study of murder worldwide, the causes were—and they put it in this nice phrase—"altercations of relatively trivial origin." Okay, so this is men—one man killing another or trying to kill each other—and they're doing it over trivial reasons, which are to them not trivial, because it's slights, displays of disrespect. And then they're fighting, or they're fighting over status, or fighting over keeping their place in a hierarchy. They can't walk away. They can't just let it go, because they've got to fight. And they fight to the death. They put themselves at risk of death, getting sued for their house, losing their life or going to jail. They do this. And so surfers do that. But men around the world do this. Right? And that's distinctively human. That's not—it's way beyond animalistic killing. That's a deeply human kind of evil. And surfers know it all too well. You grow up figuring out how to manage that shit. What's your place? You're just going to avoid it? You're going to be cheerful and just let it all slide over your head? You're going to try to work your way up the pack, your hierarchy? You're just going to be such a good surfer that everybody defers to you? You're going to try to become the local asshole, because your uncle was? So now you can do it. They've got to find their way. And that’s these dynamics. That's selfishness, but selfishness isn't really—it's too crude. What is selfishness? I mean, it's too crude. It's like, there's nothing wrong with going in and getting waves. Enjoying attunement to the wave. You can do that partly for your personal enjoyment, for the love of surfing. That's a mixed thing. Nothing wrong with that. You can just as well enjoy someone else surfing a wave, seeing someone else surf a wave for the love of surfing. But that's not—that's less selfish, more altruistic. But there's a self—you're still enjoying being part of it. But then, the really sort of pernicious form of selfish is like status consciousness and aggressive attempts to preserve your own place in a hierarchy, or put other people in their place to preserve a hierarchy you identify with. Now you're getting into dark selfishness. And that's not just one surfer greedily trying to get a wave—out-jockey someone else for a wave so you get the good wave and they don’t. That’s contest for waves. This is way beyond. This is like upholding a hierarchy—a dominance hierarchy. And that’s going way beyond. That’s selfish in lots of ways, but in a darker—morally darker.

Michael Frampton
Yeah. Yeah. Are you also saying that it's selfish in a way to compare yourself to others? And it's less selfish—like, if you're surfing to be better than someone else or catch more waves than someone else—that’s selfish. But if you're just surfing to be in tune with nature, then it's different, even though it might look—even though it might look similar to someone else. It's what's going on within you, and the reasons why you're surfing is what really matters. Which brings us right—

Aaron James
So that's a good way of thinking about how our own attitude towards surfing can corrupt the act—the very activity we're doing. Yes. So two different surfers surf similar waves. Each one—one surfs it just for the love of the wave and love of—not comparing, just enjoying, stoked. They want to share their good fortune with friends, naturally. There’s no amour-propre. There's no status consciousness there, right? Another surfer surfs a very similar wave in a very similar way, very similar style, but they're doing it to surf better than this other guy. To get more waves. To get another guy out from under—another wave from out in front of these other guys. To uphold their position in the pack hierarchy. Now, that status consciousness—those comparisons—are now—that’s pernicious. And now that's going to undercut the value of the activity. So you can think of—this is Rousseau's idea of what—a lot of our activities are conflicted in this way. So our motivations are conflicted. And so status motivation can corrupt the value of the other activities that we're otherwise doing. His famous—in the Second Discourse—the early signs of status consciousness catching on are—so he's got this idea of the settled associations of these hunter-gatherer groups, where they learn to cooperate and they get enough resources so that they have time for leisure. And then—so then they gather around a campfire just to relax together in communal activity. But then people naturally—what do you do around a campfire? Well, one person starts singing. Right? And then, oh, that's a wonderful thing. They sing and music and sharing a communal experience. But then one person has a really great voice and the other one's kind of pissed off they can't sing as well. And that comparison—already.

Michael Frampton
Yeah.

Aaron James
That's manageable. It's not really a big problem, but that's already—that’s the beginning of status consciousness—amour-propre. And that's the thing that later—once you have a system of property and money and status comparisons—that gets radicalized and undoes society. And leads to a dictatorship—kind of tyrannical dictatorship. But it starts at the campfire. So in other words, the thing that the group enjoys, the society enjoys together—which is communal activity—gets corrupted by status consciousness. And it sort of leads to this uncontrollable down-spiral. And one way of reading it is that democracy can help resolve that and give us a way to relate as equals, and then at least consolidate or isolate our status comparisons so they're limited to sporting contests and stuff like that. And—but—how well that's working is debatable. We have this mix of motivations. Some of them are natural and good—like self-concerning and other-regarding—but then there’s status consciousness, and that corrupts these other motivations and corrupts our activities. That's a really central Rousseauian idea, and surfing totally fits. I mean, arguably it fits competitive surfing as well too. I mean, maybe this is a debate about this, because competitive surfing does have lots of advantages in inducing greater performance. But for a lot of surfers themselves—if they are surfing to be the best or get a ranking—they’re essentially—that’s comparative. Like kind of status comparisons. It’s literally scored as a comparison. And that can—they can lose their own appreciation of the value of surfing.

Michael Frampton
Yes.

Aaron James
I think I remember Mark Occhilupo saying—so he'd already succeeded, I think he'd been world champion too—and he said something about how he didn't really learn to love surfing until he just surfed for himself. Now, so this is—one way that sounds selfish, but it's not. It's less selfish than him surfing to win. Him surfing to win is surfing for status. Right? He had mixed motives. Like, he always loved surfing, obviously. You don’t get to be as good a surfer as he is without loving surfing. But he acquired status in this sort of like, kind of mixed—just by his natural gifts. And he did win a year—world champ. But then, he wasn’t enough of a competitor, maybe, to really sustain it over—year after year or whatever. And then he sort of gets burned out on competition. He learns to surf for himself. But that way of putting it—I would say he’s learning to surf for himself—he’s learning to just surf for the simple beauty and joy of surfing, which is about a loss of self and connection, communion with the waves. You’re surfing—and that's learning to surf for the love of surfing, which involves valuing something for its own sake. So that’s a much less selfish—in one sense—way of being than the status-conscious way. No, I don't actually have anything against professional surfing either. But I think it has its risks.

Michael Frampton
Yeah. Yeah. For most of us, surfing is an art form. For some people, it's a sport and a competition. But I think that’s a—that’s a nice way to round it off and to finish the conversation here, which is where we started, which is surfing for yourself and for, you know, the attunement and just keep it simple—for the simple act of surfing.

Aaron James
Yeah. Yeah. Surfing for yourself and surfing for surfing don't have to be—they can be just a blurred thing. Self and surfing blurred. So it's not inherently selfish. It's self-transcending.

Michael Frampton
Yeah. Aaron, thank you so much for being on the podcast. I appreciate it.

Aaron James
Yeah. Yeah.

Michael Frampton
Great to be with you.

111 Surfing, Philosophy & the Search for Meaning: Longevity & Adventure with Aaron James

For the passionate surfer—whether you're a weekend warrior, a surf dad, or an older surfer—this podcast is all about better surfing and deeper stoke. With expert surf coaching, surf training, and surfing tips, we’ll help you catch more waves, refine your paddling technique, and perfect your pop up on a surfboard. From surf workouts to handling wipeouts, chasing bigger waves, and mastering surf technique, we’re here to make sure you not only improve but truly enjoy surfing more—so you can get more out of every session and become a wiser surfer. Go from Beginner or intermediate Surfer to advanced.