Winter Bike Commute Insta is Yoga Handstand Insta for Men and It’s What We Deserve
Listen — if you’re out there in the 10 below weather scooting around on a fat bike in a helmet and goggles and big gloves and whatever else — Good For You. Chances are you’re also a 30-something white man with certain visions of urban renewal which involve mansplaining a place called “Amsterdam.” Similarly: Good For You. I bet you got a great workout before work, and used no gas, and maybe even screamed at some cars, and by the time you posted photos of yourself on this journey, decided that 10 below didn’t feel so bad BECAUSE YOU WERE DRESSED FOR IT.
Good for you.
Not here to “unpack” any of that other than to ask for bike recommendations for my 80-year-old mother with two hip replacements: what’s her best bet for biking to the grocery store and back in a mid-January snowstorm?
We Asked For This
Anyway what I’m here to say is that we as women deserve this hell. We deserve it because we’ve been posting photos of our handstand progress on Insta for a decade now. The assumption is that anyone cares: they do not. And yet, we persist.
“Handstand progress day 10!”
“Handstand on the beach!”
“Straight into handstand from a prone position! Wowowowow!”
NO. ONE. CARES.
EVERYBODY. IS. ANNOYED.
Endemic Posturing
It’s hard to say whether Handstand Insta or Winter Bike Commute Insta is worse. Maybe it’s because they’re equivalent. Both contain ingredients of Look At Me I’m Hot, combined with a sprinkle of My Enlightened Lifestyle to create a recurring omelette of insufferablilty.
Are both things here to stay? Probably.
Is there anything we can do about it? Probably not. Both things will continue with the occasional mutation, much like a certain virus that need not be named. At some point, you just live with it, even if you don’t like it.
Should You Just Get It Over With?
Of course, you could also just get your own fat bike and yoga mat and start documenting your own journey of going outside and upside down for the masses. Join the movement! Denounce the haters! Become the future! Declare your intentionality!
Sure, you could. Although this is the equivalent of attending a wedding maskless in the middle of a big pandemic surge. Will you be infected? Oh probably. Will it be worth it?
I mean.
So Whatever
There is no point here other than to say, these man-photos of winter bike commutes should not be surprising. Science could have predicted them. Public handstands were the gateway drug. And now, here we are, living in the inevitable consequence.
Good luck out there.
