When I first started doing parkour I didn’t have any friends in the hobby. I also didn’t watch parkour videos on youtube. I was mostly dicking about on my own, and whenever a non-parkour person would compliment me on my skill it would feel great and I’d revel in it. Later, there was a phase were I still had no friends doing parkour, but I was watching some of the best athletes in the world on youtube. At that time, whenever someone complimented me, it felt like I was cheating, and/or secretly low-status and they just hadn’t gotten the memo.
The past two years, I’ve found a group of friends to train parkour with, and I’m at the top of the skill ladder in that group. Now a days I notice I don’t feel the same pangs of “I’m cheating”.
This makes me think that what exactly your “local community” is can be finnicky. My local community went from no one, the whole world, to 9 people. What’s interesting is that it’s not as if I forgot that there’s a whole world of professional parkour athletes. It seems like I was able to feel like I had more status because my local community had more “weight” than the rest of the world.
My experience would generate the advice: the more you interact with a larger global group where you are outclassed/low-status, the more you need to interact with a smaller local group where you are high-status.
Thing I’ve noticed about status/prestige.
When I first started doing parkour I didn’t have any friends in the hobby. I also didn’t watch parkour videos on youtube. I was mostly dicking about on my own, and whenever a non-parkour person would compliment me on my skill it would feel great and I’d revel in it. Later, there was a phase were I still had no friends doing parkour, but I was watching some of the best athletes in the world on youtube. At that time, whenever someone complimented me, it felt like I was cheating, and/or secretly low-status and they just hadn’t gotten the memo.
The past two years, I’ve found a group of friends to train parkour with, and I’m at the top of the skill ladder in that group. Now a days I notice I don’t feel the same pangs of “I’m cheating”.
This makes me think that what exactly your “local community” is can be finnicky. My local community went from no one, the whole world, to 9 people. What’s interesting is that it’s not as if I forgot that there’s a whole world of professional parkour athletes. It seems like I was able to feel like I had more status because my local community had more “weight” than the rest of the world.
My experience would generate the advice: the more you interact with a larger global group where you are outclassed/low-status, the more you need to interact with a smaller local group where you are high-status.