Nelson’s Corner | August 2024

E-bikes, and technology generally, are going to be the ruin of us.

Full disclosures: I have a lifelong love affair with bicycles and I am writing this on a MacBook Air.

The bicycle is among humankind’s most elegant inventions. Having walked, run, driven, and flown, I believe bicycle pace is the optimal speed from which to view our world – fast enough to feast on an endless visual buffet and slow enough to enjoy each offering.

As a young boy, my cycling adventures seemed quite grand, although a later visit to my childhood neighborhood revealed the distance to be about five miles, round trip. I always packed a lunch and sat at the turnaround eating PB and J, marveling that I reached the wilderness by dint of my own strength and daring. Later, a bicycle was my primary transportation to friends’ houses, the bowling alley and swimming pool.

As a newlywed, I cycled to work and college courses. En route, I would carry our kids to daycare and school in a backpack and bicycle seat. It became, I admit, a bit extreme, following this regimen year-round, every day, rain, shine, or snow. I wore rain gear and carried a suit and tie in a backpack, changing in any available space before walking into business meetings.

On weekend mornings, I often arose before dawn and rode 40 or 50 miles, to familiar places previously visited by automobile. I’d arrive home and make pancakes. Later I parlayed that into cycle racing, a different but still unmatchable experience. Ask any racer; there is no feeling of being vibrantly alive greater than riding in a colorful pack, through tight corners at 30-35 mph.

I will restrain further romanticism to get to the point. The self-reliance and self-assurance of navigating part of the world under one’s own power is invaluable in many ways. I fear that today’s children are being shortchanged and the cycling example is but a part.

E-bikes have metastasized like a plague of locusts. I understand the attraction. My granddaughter has one and I suppose I would have traded my sluggish Schwinn for an E-bike in a New York minute. But a lifelong slice of magic would have been lost. The ability to navigate my now much smaller world by way of pedal strokes is the most meaningful capacity that survived — or returned after — a devastating spinal cord injury in 2020. I declined a motorized wheelchair and now, cycling again on the single track that busted my body, I very mildly resent the E-bikes passing me as I grind uphill.

Although a brief digression, I am sad to predict a coming epidemic of horrific E-bike carnage. Far too many kids are going far too fast, many without helmets, and their frontal lobes are insufficiently developed to protect their frontal lobes. There should be helmet laws and parents should be subject to significant fines if their children ride without helmets.

Like E-bikes, iPads, calculators, artificial intelligence, and keyboards facilitate tasks in a way that diminishes both the process and the reward. Struggling stimulates growth, and many indicators suggest that today’s youth are struggle-averse. It may sound old-fashioned, but any satisfaction in life is strongly correlated with the effort put forth. Striving is a shrinking art for many kids. They just have easier pathways to virtually everything.

I’m neither Luddite nor fuddy-duddy, and this concern is not just about my sense of the value of work. There are vital aspects of physical, cognitive, and emotional development that are bypassed or neglected in an automated and electrified world. As I often observed as a school head, a digitized representation of life is not life itself. And the more children are immersed in the former, the less they will experience of the latter.

Parents can mitigate the harm by offering or insisting on organic experiences as companion and contrast to the digital world.

If your children have E-bikes, enforce a helmet rule and drain the batteries now and then. Make them complete school assignments with pencils and then pedal to the park and view the sunset over the Rockies from the apex of a swing. 

Someday they might thank you.