The Death of Skateboarding

For a good three years, skateboarding was practically the only thing I thought about. This was reflected in all aspects of my life: the clothes I wore, what I saw and posted on Instagram, and the gifts I’d receive on Christmas.

Of course, I wasn’t unique in this. For people who give skateboarding an honest chance, it quickly becomes something to obsess over. It’s an all-consuming hobby, and until recently, a glorious one to have. Skateboarding is a path of self-expression, a rigorous exercise, an activity that you can progress at endlessly, and its own little culture.

Now that I’ve become more removed from the goings-on in the skateboarding world, I see things from a bird’s eye view. From this distance, it’s clear that the marvel of what skating once was has become murky, to say the least, and in some cases, downright disturbing.

To be trite, it’s just not the same anymore. The bubble that’s been expanding since the early 2000s has popped. The industry can no longer subsist on its early stars, who are now seemingly more focused on podcasting or attempting to be businessmen. The problem then becomes that skateboarding’s new faces are drowned out in a sea of oversaturation, which causes skaters who are just starting out to lose the allure that many of us found when we first stepped on a board.

Predictably, this can be blamed easily on social media. Beginners simply cannot latch onto a favorite skater when everybody you see on Instagram is just as good as the last guy. Enjoying a session with a friend is increasingly difficult when you’re constantly burdened with the pressure to get a clip for TikTok, only for this clip, too, to be lost among thousands of others just like you.

There was a time where skating felt truly special—it was healthily gatekept, and it felt like you were a part of something unique. This is no more. When a subculture becomes something that everyone encounters in the mainstream day after day, how can you call it a subculture?

I started really trying at skating in 2020. Like all hobbies, skating saw a remarkable surge in popularity when the pandemic hit. When a life is put on pause, one rushes to find new ways to occupy themselves. Unfortunately, this was also around the time when I was spending copious amounts of time on TikTok, where I quickly became upset at those who appeared to be getting into skating disingenuously. People liked the aesthetics of it, whether it be the associated clothing or the way it felt somewhat anti-establishment. Sure, you can say there is a level of toxicity here. No one likes the guy who calls out “posers,” but this is just a surface level assessment. You can call it bullying, but more significantly, people are trying earnestly to protect their scene from the infringement of those who are insincere about being a part of it.

From 2020 onwards, skating has become distant from what it once was. Skating was anti- establishment, rebellious, and in many cases, a straight-up crime. It was an insular community curated by skaters and for skaters. With technology, the communal aspect of it has faded. A skateshop used to be the central hub of a local scene. With the rise of online shopping, though, you’d be lucky if a brick-and-mortar shop even exists near you in 2025. Within the short few years that I was deep into skateboarding, the average price of a deck shot from $55 to $70. Board sales are dropping—people are disenchanted with the activity as a whole.

Part of this has to do with the perennial problem of instant gratification. Skateboarding is really, really fucking hard. I’d argue that kids today have a difficult time accepting this. Scrolling on a social media feed, you see fifty unknown skaters doing pro-level tricks seamlessly. This is discouraging. The image you get of perfection from a never-ending Instagram feed is far from what skateboarding is actually like. Falling on hard concrete for weeks at a time while trying to learn a new trick is the point. Instead of understanding that the process of actively trying to progress is part of the fun, kids are barraged with the finished product daily, leading them to believe that that is what they should be like. When they realize it’s not that simple, they understandably give up.

Additionally, there are fewer and fewer skaters to look up to. Take the biggest names in skateboarding—Tony Hawk, or Paul Rodriguez, for example. These guys who were at one point in their careers the pinnacle of success and innovation in their respective styles, have sold out completely. Of course, these guys are aging out of their abilities—you cannot expect them to be releasing quality skate footage like they used to. But you’d think that despite this, as owners of their own companies, they would still champion the industry and attempt to uphold it as what it was when they were in the limelight. Instead, Tony Hawk is on an insufferable podcast, hosting almost as many guests from the Austin-Comedy-Rogansphere-Scene as actual skateboarders. Hawk’s new ProSkater video game is essentially a complete remake of the old games, except for it being riddled with Taco Bell advertisements. When I was a kid, Tony Hawk was for all intents and purposes the face of the skate scene. Kids today can look him up on YouTube and instead watch him talk to Bert Kreischer for an hour and a half.

Aside from the old stars, there are hardly any new stars. There are certainly heavy hitters in skating today, but few of them embody what skateboarding truly is—or, was. Jamie Foy, who won Thrasher Magazine’s Skater of the Year Award in 2024, is one of the few I can point to who still skates like a core skateboarder. Aside from him, many of skating’s younger faces have morphed into something merely skateboarding-adjacent. Kader Sylla, who was one of the most popular up-and-comers when I first stepped on a board, is too famous for his own good now. His self-presentation is more akin to a rapper now than a skateboarder. The companies he’s sponsored by, like Violet Skateboards and Supreme are closer to fashion brands, whose trip videos seem more focused on the luxuriousness of travel than the skateboarding that takes place during said travel.

Today we have skate companies fighting to uphold skateboarding’s values. Take Sci-Fi Fantasy or Last Resort AB for a couple of modern brands owned by skaters. These companies are great, but of course, there are just as many brands that are marketed as skate companies but have become something else. Paul Rodriguez owns Primitive Skateboards, whose website is indistinguishable from a bunch of images of likely cheaply made clothing trying too hard to adhere to popular fast-fashion trends. This is an old-ish brand that’s sold out, but there are also new brands that never even tried. Edglrd is a new brand created by the king of edgelords himself — Harmony Korine—a sometimes interesting filmmaker, but not a skateboarder. Edglrd released one skate video, but is also credited as making a music video for Yeat, and is funded by the Reuben Brothers, who are British billionaires with questionable involvement with Israel, as well as the Izmaylovskaya mafia. Needless to say, this is not good for skateboarding. Billionaires, by definition, are anti-skateboarding.

The hobby I used to love passionately is now in an almost dystopian state. The industry has eaten itself alive, and has become merely an image, a costume anyone can put on. It’s the same old story: what used to be about the act of skateboarding itself has become a consumer product. Though the infrastructure surrounding skating is suffocatingly oppressive, I don’t think skating is past the point of no return. A kickflip is still a kickflip and falling still hurts the same. But it’s getting increasingly unbelievable for people to skate for skating’s sake in all its purity.