We are dying from the thing we love

My shore-break instructor is standing on the sand, waving my phone above his head.

I can’t hear it ringing over the surf, but I know what it is. An inquiry. A booking. But he won't answer it. He can’t abandon his station, and even if he did, he doesn’t know the business well enough to talk a stranger into a reservation. So he just stands there. Waving it.

I can’t help him. I’m chest-deep in the water, getting hammered by the sets. My student is on his final day. He is completely exhausted. He’s staring at the horizon, questioning if his arms have anything left in the tank, but he’s determined to finish what he started.

As his coach, I owe him my eyes.

The phone keeps ringing. But I can only be in one place.

By the time the salt dries on my skin and I finally return that call, it's too late. They’ve already booked somewhere else.

This is the trap. I’ve been stuck in it since 2011. The cruel irony of the ocean business is that the more you grow, the more you drown. Growth demands more water time. More coaching. More eyes on the rip current. It leaves absolutely zero time to actually run the business. You become so consumed with delivering the experience that you physically cannot capture the next one.

People ask what I do on my days off. I just laugh.

There are no days off.

An "off day" is a myth. It means breathing in fiberglass dust while patching dings on the rental fleet. It means staring at a screen, editing an Instagram reel because the algorithm doesn't care if your shoulders are shot. It means pausing that edit to field a call from a corporate HR rep trying to squeeze you for a cheap group discount. Then, it's back to the resin.

Social life?

There isn't one. The rest of the world makes plans for the evening at the exact moment my body quits. By 7 PM, I am a ghost. I stare through the windshield, dragging myself through 24 kilometers of traffic. I walk through my front door and pass out hard on the mattress by 9. No shower. No conversation. Just the itch of dried salt and dead weight.

Then the alarm hits at 4 AM in the dark. Back to the sand. The 5 AM class is waiting.

And the work days? They break you in a different way.

Take today. I’m holding this board. The sets are rolling in. And I am down a man.

One of my instructors hasn’t turned up. No call. No text. Just an empty stretch of sand where he’s supposed to be standing.

I smile at my student, tell him to paddle hard, but my jaw is tight. My mind is spinning while the water pulls at my legs. Is the kid actually sick? Did he just walk away without a word? Was he expecting a pay raise I literally cannot afford to give him? Is he just as bone-tired as I am?

Or did he wake up this morning and decide he can do this alone?

Alone. Funny. Good luck to him. If he goes it alone, he’s just walking right into the exact same cage I'm standing in.

I push the student into a wave and watch him pop up. The water is glassy. The breeze is perfect. This is the postcard. Isn't this the dream job? Running an ocean school by the sea.

So what is wrong? Where the hell is this all going?

We are dying from the very thing we love.

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I started Homoseapien so we'd stop doing this alone.

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