Why Do People Talk About Skiing So Much?

Skiing is uniquely popular among young people - why?

For a while, I’ve been wondering why skiing is so popular among people my age, at least those on the West Coast. Compared to similar activities, it seems like skiing takes up an unusually large amount of people’s thoughts. As one example, when I was in third grade, one of my classmates drew a map of the Portland area for an in-class assignment, and he decided to include the nearby mountain Mt. Hood. He drew stick figures representing several of us on the mountain, skiing down, and then after realizing that I hadn’t actually gone skiing before, he erased my representation, which definitely didn’t cause me to feel sad and excluded to the extent that I would remember this exact moment 15 years later. (If this was you, and you’re reading this, I forgive you).

Though there has been less stick figure-based trauma in my life more recently, people do often talk about skiing. Most of the clubs I’m in at Berkeley have a chat for planning skiing trips. People talk a lot about being excited for the next ski season (during the non-ski season) and being excited for their next ski trip (during the ski season). Whenever it snows a lot on the mountain, people will say things like “Looking like great skiing next week!” I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone say they’re NOT looking forward to an upcoming skiing trip.

So… why is that?

Maybe skiing is just really fun?

My personal experience with skiing is fairly limited, as I’ve only gone for 7-8 total days. Personally, I found it fun! I’m not that good, and most of my time was involved in “trying really hard to keep my skis straight and turn properly and AWAY FROM THE TREE and okay now back the other way” instead of “enjoying the adrenaline rush of skiing well”. But it was still fun.

That said, it was still well within the range of “fun experiences I’ve had.” That is to say, it wasn’t way better than other similarly adrenaline-y fun things I’ve done, like go-karting, trampoline parks, or ziplining. It could be that if I just do it enough, it will be really fun eventually, but there are people who are similarly mediocre at skiing as me who are extremely excited about skiing, and I have never heard someone propose a long trip to an especially nice go-kart facility. (Maybe this happens in Germany).

So I think it’s pretty unlikely that the reason people get really excited about skiing in particular is because it’s truly much better than other similar experiences. I understand that some people do think this (some people think this about basically every hobby), but I don’t think it’s true for the average skier. Skiing is fun, but there must be some other aspect to it that makes everyone mention it so much.

Skiing as a signaling game

So that leads me to my second thought: skiing is somewhat of a signaling game. After all, think of the requirements in order to go on a ski trip:

1. You need to have enough money to pay for the trip. Lift tickets can be $150/day, rentals $80/day, travel to the resort and back is often relatively expensive, lodging costs money, random things like gloves and goggles can add some money. Overall a three-day ski trip can easily cost over $1000, which is not a crazy amount of money but is certainly not nothing. If you can pay $1000 to go on a ski trip, that implies that you have some amount of disposable income.

2. You need to be reasonably physically fit, at least if you’re going to have fun. Skiing is a full-body exercise and especially if you are not an efficient skier, you’re going to burn a lot of calories. There’s a reason you don’t see a lot of overweight people skiing.

3. You need to have some risk tolerance. Skiing is not a zero-risk sport - although the death rate is about 0.7 per million visits, which is about the same as driving 100 miles, the injury rate is about 1 in 300 visits, which is very much above zero. I know multiple people that have been injured skiing. 1 in 300 isn’t so high that you’d expect to be injured often, but if you are going down higher difficulty slopes, there’s a reasonable chance of being injured somehow.

4. Finally, you need to have free time available to go skiing. A ski trip typically takes up multiple days, or most of one day - it’s not something you can do particularly easily, unless you live right next to a ski resort. So if you’re constantly busy, you’re going to have a tough time going skiing often.

Interestingly, these things - having disposable income, being physically fit, having risk tolerance, and free time - are all things that you might be looking for when finding someone to date. In fact, I would bet that the average skier is a much more attractive candidate in the dating pool than the average non-skier. Instead of saying all of these things, you can just say “I enjoy skiing,” which I predict will be a much more successful strategy than saying “I have lots of disposable income,” although I suppose it depends who you’re trying to attract.

Outside of dating, they’re also things that make you more attractive as a potential friend. Free time means you’ll have time to hang out, risk tolerance means you’ll be able to do more interesting activities, physical fitness means you can do physically demanding things, disposable income means you don’t have to worry as much about prices. And if you also like skiing, now you have an activity you can do together.

Importantly, also, skiing is not entirely inaccessible. It’s not that hard to get started with skiing, and it doesn’t require tens of thousands of dollars or that much time. Hobbies like “running marathons” or “dirt biking” also signal a lot of the same things, but running marathons requires a pretty large time commitment, and dirt biking requires a pretty large monetary commitment. In contrast, you can go skiing for the first time for a high but not crazy cost, and you don’t have to train for six months to start.

So if you’ve got to choose something to spend a lot of time talking about, skiing is a pretty good choice, as opposed to things with more negative connotations like playing video games. It makes you seem more athletic, attractive, and wealthy, which are all things that people want to be perceived as.

Is that bad?

Often when people say something is a “signaling game” they mean that it is somehow bad. Like, when someone says a politician is just signaling something, they mean that they’re just saying words that they don’t necessarily completely believe in order to gain the support of the public. You’ve probably heard the term “virtue signaling,” or saying things to show that you have a certain quality without actually having the quality. It’s certainly true that some signaling is bad.

But I think signaling is not always bad. I think it’s bad when you’re using it to signal something that’s wrong. For example, lots of foods are described with words like “natural” and “organic” to signal that they are healthy. If they’re not actually healthy (and many of them are not!) then this is bad signaling - you are being misleading about your product, and consumers are going to believe something that is not actually true.

An example of good signaling is the USAMO, or the USA Mathematical Olympiad, a very difficult math test for high school students. Qualifying for the USAMO is an incredibly difficult task - you need to be somewhere in the top 500 high schoolers in the country at competitive math problems. Doing well is even more difficult. If you qualify for and do well at the USAMO, you have to be extremely good at math. On your resume, you can say “scored well on USAMO,” and that will signal that you are very good at math. If signals like this didn’t exist, you could figure out that someone was good at math by asking them math problems, but this is much faster. This is signaling, but it’s good signaling - you are signaling that you are good at math, and you are actually good at math! You’ve managed to do all the work of convincing people that you are good at math in four words.

I tend to think skiing falls more in the second category. If you want your friends to have free time, and want to be able to do physical activities with them, it is probably better to be able to say “I enjoy skiing” instead of performing 20 push-ups every time you meet someone new, even though the latter would be much more entertaining. It also filters for disposable income, which is less ideal as a category of thing you would pick your friends for, but given that lots of other things also do this I think it is not especially terrible. A lot of these other things (designer handbags, expensive wine, etc.) have questionable appeal outside of the signaling aspect, and they seem a lot more worthy of criticism than skiing.

So even if skiing is partially a signaling game, I don’t think the signaling is a bad thing, and skiing itself is certainly a good thing. You shouldn’t stop mentioning that you like skiing, if you do. (Maybe you should mention it more!) I think this sort of signaling is relatively common and pretty harmless. Skiing is just a small example of the interesting world of things people talk about in order to subtly influence people’s opinions of them. Personally, I’m just happy to finally understand why people talk about it so much.

Anyways, I’ve gotta finish up editing this post, need to wake up early tomorrow to hit the slopes. Lots of fresh powder out there!