Gadget Bicycles and Dilettantism

Last Sunday, I did one of my favorite bike rides through an Amish neighborhood near Middlefield, then back home via the Maple Highlands Trail bike path. The weather was ideal, so lots of people were out. I was on the bike path for about 10 miles, or about 30 minutes of my hour and forty-five minutes of riding. I realized most of the recreational rider people I passed were on a "gadget bike" of some kind. That is, it really deviated from the classic safety bicycle double diamond design that's been around for so long.

The two big gadget categories are recumbent trikes and ebikes. The people riding a classic road bike are few and far between. Road bikes are still the largest single category of bicycle by sales volume per year, but constitute less than half of aggregate bicycle sales according to the stats I see.

Sports like cycling are fad driven consumer activities in the US. This is a pattern I noticed over my life. Road cycling went through two booms, for example, since I've been riding. The first was the Greg LeMond boom in the late 1980s. The second was the Lance Armstrong boom in the late 1990s and early 2000s. During the booms, it was possible to go racing regularly. In between the booms, the number of active participants gets really low so in lower population areas, there's not even any races. Sports like rollerblading came and went in a  handful of years. Various "e" vehicles are the current fad/sport consumer stuff apparently.

Fad sports are part of a larger pattern of behavior in the US that's driven by the financial system and apparent debt driven "wealth" of the US which I'd label "dilettantism".  It's common for a person to try a bunch of different activities and hobbies in the US. It's rare for someone to pursue mastery of a sport or hobby. People can imagine they'd "like" pursuing a given sport, buy the gear, then don't really have time or the inclination to do it. It's like playing at playing.

Ironically, the reason people don't have the time to do what they imagine they'd like to do is they are spread thin through dilettantism. They don't gave time to be a good cyclist because they also imagine they want to golf, go fishing, work on classic cars, ride ATVs, mow their lawns, etc... A significant portion of the US population with at least a middle class income is like that. This leads to the phenomenon of "inch deep, mile wide" where people have no depth of knowledge, but some experience on many topics. This scenario is very common.

I think this tendency seeps into professional life as well and is exacerbated by LLMs, which allow amateurs and hacks to imagine they "know what they're doing" because they have a chatbot barf up an apparent answer to a question they type in. In reality, hardly anyone knows what he's doing.