This was published 2 years ago
Modern Guru: Why do people keep telling me to get an e-bike?
As a keen cyclist, I’m fed up with continual “Get an e-bike” comments from my e-biking friends. No longer smiling courteously, I now retort with: “Hello ... I’m actually exercising!” Is there any way I could handle this better?
S.M., Wollongong, NSW
Since the dawn of humankind, this has been a thing. Millions of years ago, our earliest mammalian ancestors might have been walking around on their quadrupedal feet when an upright, bipedal ape strolled past, yelling, “Hey, try out these newly evolved feet! I call them e-feet!” And the quadrupedal mammal might have yelled back, “Hello ... I’ve got my genitals tucked away nice and safe! E-feet are a fad! It’ll never catch on!”
This was a thing when donkey-pulled carts became popular (“Pfff, you won’t see me riding around on one of those donk-e-carts. Lazy buggers. I’m an e-feeter all the way!”) It was a thing when Thomas Edison invented the electric light bulb (“E-bulbs are the devil’s work! I’m sticking to my easily breakable, highly flammable kerosene lamp, which I’ll put next to my bed made of cheap wood and straw”). It’ll be a thing sometime in the future when wormhole-bikes replace e-bikes (“Hello ... at least my features haven’t been grotesquely distorted by the gravitational effects of interdimensional travel! Embarrassing!“)
Each new stage of human progress has divided people into the embracers and the old-schoolers. The old-schoolers shouldn’t judge the embracers, just like the embracers shouldn’t hassle the old-schoolers; everyone should just smile courteously and accept that This Is A Thing.
And maybe your e-biking friends are still getting enough exercise. I have a friend who rides his e-bike everywhere, enjoying the lovely sunshine with minimal effort. Then, at night, he does 30 gruelling minutes on his exercise bike, sweating away in a dark, musty, airless shed.
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Danny Katz is a columnist for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He writes the Modern Guru column in the Good Weekend magazine. He is also the author of the books Spit the Dummy, Dork Geek Jew and the Little Lunch series for kids.