From Languishing to Flourishing on Two WheelsA Personal and Cultural Exploration of Motorcycling in North America

Abby Harper
Jan 20
16 min read

The First Weekend

The parking lot was empty except for a scatter of orange cones and a row of small, slightly battered training bikes. It was early, the kind of cool, grey morning that makes coffee feel more like medicine than comfort. Eight of us stood around while two instructors—both with sun-creased faces and the relaxed posture of people who have spent years on the road—explained how not to embarrass ourselves.

We started with basics. How to mount the bike without kicking anything important. Where the controls lived. How the clutch worked. I listened carefully, nodded at the right moments, and understood almost nothing.

When my turn came, I eased the clutch out a fraction, rolled the throttle a little, and stalled the engine instantly. The bike shuddered once in protest and went silent. I tried again. Another stall. By the fourth attempt, my palms were damp inside my gloves and I was acutely aware that everyone could hear each failure.

What surprised me wasn’t the frustration. It was the intensity of it. For the first time in months, my attention was wholly occupied by a single task. Either the bike would move or it wouldn’t; there was no mental space left for the news, the case counts, or the vague sense that my life had settled into a low, unchanging hum.

I had come to that weekend because something in me had quietly gone dim.

Naming the Fog

In the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of people were anxious, grieving, or clinically depressed. I did not think I was one of them. I was functioning. I worked from home, met deadlines, showed up to video calls, and replied to messages with the right small talk. From the outside, nothing had changed.

Inside, everything had flattened.

Tasks that used to be trivial—making a proper meal, calling a friend, tidying the bedroom—had begun to feel inexplicably heavy. Days blurred into one another. The problem wasn’t sharp sadness or panic; it was a kind of emotional static. I moved, but I did not feel as if I were going anywhere.

Psychologist Corey Keyes has a term for this state: languishing. It sits between full mental health and diagnosable illness, in the space where people are not in crisis but are no longer truly well. There is little joy, little curiosity, and even less momentum. You are not collapsing, just slowly coming apart.

When I first encountered Keyes’s work, it was like finding a diagnosis for a persistent but vague ache. I was not failing at being resilient; I was experiencing something that had a name, a pattern, and consequences. Recognizing that didn’t fix it, but it did remove a layer of shame. The question shifted from “What is wrong with me?” to “What might actually help?”

That answer did not arrive through a therapist’s office or a self-help program. It appeared—somewhat implausibly—in the form of a targeted online advertisement.

The Seed Is Planted

Late one night, half-watching a show I barely remember, my attention drifted to the screen between scenes. An image filled it: a solitary rider tracing a curve on an empty two-lane road at sunset. The copy was straightforward: Local motorcycle safety course. No experience required. Weekend format.

It was stock photography. The composition was almost clichéd: road disappearing into the distance, sky on fire, rider anonymous behind the helmet. Yet compared with the radius of my life at that point—bedroom, kitchen, desk, grocery store—the scene felt radical. Here was motion, exposure, risk. The rider looked small but decisively alive.

Motorcycles have occupied that symbolic space in North American culture for decades. After the Second World War, many returning veterans gravitated toward motorcycles for their mix of companionship, speed, and risk. Hollywood followed. The Wild One in the 1950s and Easy Rider in the late 1960s embedded the figure of the rider as rebel, drifter, countercultural pilgrim. Machines became metaphors: for freedom, refusal, self-invention.

Modern marketing continues to draw on those images. Solitary riders on empty highways, impossibly clean leather jackets, light slanting just so. Under normal conditions, I would have scrolled past the ad with a small, private eyeroll. In that particular season of life, it struck a different nerve. I did not need rebellion or escape; I needed to feel something other than grey.

It also felt ridiculous. I am cautious by nature. Friends and family are quick with accident statistics. I had never changed my own oil, let alone operated a motorcycle. The communities I associated with riding—leathers, tattoos, bravado—felt distant from my orderly, professional life.

But languishing thrives on repetition. The more predictable the routine, the easier it is for meaning to leach away. The idea of learning something demanding and slightly dangerous, under supervision, in a controlled environment, lodged itself in my mind. A motorcycle safety course would not fix my life, I knew. It might at least introduce a different kind of problem.

A few days later, I stopped just thinking about it. I entered my credit-card number, picked a date, and enrolled.

Learning to Ride, Learning to Cope

That weekend in the parking lot unfolded in small, manageable increments. Our instructors began with the least glamorous parts of riding: how to push a disabled bike safely; how to sit on it without tipping it over; how to start and stop without drama.

The friction zone—the narrow band of clutch movement that decides whether the bike will stall, roll, or surge—became a kind of metaphor. There was no way to intellectualize it; you found it with trial, error, and repetition. When the engine caught and the bike rolled forward smoothly for the first time, the sensation was absurdly powerful for such a minor achievement.

At our breaks, I spoke with the other students. Samantha worked in finance and wanted, as she put it, “something in my life that doesn’t fit in a spreadsheet.” Ray was mid-divorce and looking for a skill that would give him a reason to leave the house on weekends. We were not the leather-clad outlaws of popular imagination, just adults in various stages of recalibration.

Social psychologist Albert Bandura describes self-efficacy—the belief in one’s ability to meet challenges—as a crucial foundation of resilience. It does not come from positive thinking; it comes from doing something difficult and surviving it. Each stall followed by a clean start, each shaky turn replaced by a stable one, added a tiny brick to that foundation.

At the end of the course, we took a modest practical test: controlled stops, simple curves, a basic emergency maneuver. I passed. The certificate I received said I was now qualified to ride a motorcycle on public roads. It meant more than that. It was the first concrete evidence, in a long time, that I could decide to become a beginner at something, endure discomfort, and move from ignorance to competence.

For someone who had been floating, that felt like a beginning.

Choosing a First Bike

In the weeks after the course, my internet history shifted abruptly. I read about engine layouts—single cylinders, parallel twins, V-twins, inline fours—and how they changed a bike’s character. I learned why long-time riders advise against starting on heavyweight cruisers or race-replica sportbikes, and why mid-sized machines in the 300 to 650cc range are often described as ideal first companions.

I also became deeply aware of two separate forces. One was practical: weight, seat height, insurance premiums, the cost of dropping the bike in a parking lot. The other was cultural: the immense gravitational pull of certain badges and silhouettes. Part of me wanted to stride out of the dealership with a chromed, rumbling Harley-Davidson because that is what non-riders think a motorcycle is.

Sanity prevailed. With help from a local forum and a patient salesperson, I settled on a Honda Rebel 500: manageable weight, modest but sufficient power, a seat low enough that I could put both feet flat at a stop. It was not the most dramatic choice. It was the right one. The first time I swung a leg over my motorcycle in the dealership lot, the emotion that surfaced was not triumph, but a kind of cautious relief.

Riding, I was discovering, had less to do with image and more to do with whether you could reach the ground and stop when you meant to. Flourishing, I suspected, might be similarly unglamorous.

Flow, Focus, and the Quiet Road

My early rides were short and conservative. I circled my neighbourhood in wide loops, practicing smooth stops and second-gear curves. I learned which intersections collected gravel, which driveways concealed impatient drivers, where the wind funnelled between buildings.

Gradually, the radius expanded. One crisp morning, I followed a secondary road that slipped out of the suburbs and into farmland. The air was damp and cold enough to bite through my gloves. Frost lingered in the ditches. The road dipped into a stand of tall pines that rose on either side like a green corridor. For a few minutes, the only sounds were the low pulse of the engine and the wind around my helmet.

Time did something strange. It did not race or drag; it simply receded. All the bandwidth in my mind was occupied with speed, surface, and sightlines: How far can I see? What is my margin if that car brakes suddenly? Is there loose gravel on the shoulder of this next corner?

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called this deep absorption flow—a state in which challenge and skill are well matched, and attention is fully engaged. In flow, the sense of self-threat fades because the self is preoccupied with doing the task in front of it. On a motorcycle, flow is not optional. The machine and the environment demand your presence.

I had tried mindfulness apps before the pandemic. They were well designed. I lasted three days each time. Sitting still and observing my breath felt like another item on a list of things I was failing at. Riding, especially in those early months, functioned as an unintentional mindfulness practice. I did not ride to “work on my mental health”; I rode because it felt good and required me to be awake.

The impact was visible elsewhere. After a weekend ride, the inbox on Monday morning seemed less menacing. Repetitive days were still repetitive, but they no longer felt like evidence that life had ended. I had something to look forward to and, more importantly, something to improve at.

How Riding Fed Flourishing

Keyes argues that flourishing—the opposite of languishing—is not a single mood, but a composite of ingredients. Among them are helping others, learning, play, spiritual or reflective life, and social connection. Motorcycling, unexpectedly, touched each of these.

Helping others. Once I could ride with some confidence, I joined a local group that organized charity runs. One December, we delivered donated toys to a community centre in a less affluent part of the city. A convoy of riders in full gear, each with a bright package strapped to the back, is not subtle. Children lined the sidewalk watching us arrive. It was a small thing—an afternoon, some fuel, a few gifts—but it changed the emotional texture of riding for me. The bike was no longer just a private escape; it was a tool for contributing, however modestly.

Learning. Motorcycling offers a near-endless ladder of skills. After basic operation comes cornering technique, braking on uneven surfaces, riding in rain, carrying a passenger, maintaining your chain, checking tire pressures properly, changing oil. Each competency is minor in isolation. Together, they accumulate into a sense that you are not static. For someone who had felt frozen in place, these incremental gains mattered.

Play. There is no sophisticated way to say this: motorcycles are fun. Gliding along a well-surfaced road that bends and straightens in a steady rhythm is as close as most adults get to the simple joy of childhood bicycle riding. That joy is not frivolous. Languishing flattens affect; play restores contrast.

Spiritual and reflective life. I am wary of grandiose language, but there were moments on the road—cresting a hill at sunrise, or riding through a silent stand of old-growth forest—when the combination of exposure, vulnerability, and beauty produced something that felt like reverence. Not all riders would call it spiritual. Many describe it simply as clarity.

Social connection. Motorcycling is often marketed as an individual pursuit: one rider, one road. In practice, it is dense with community. Group rides, skills courses, online forums, informal meetups at coffee shops and gas stations—these are places where people from different professions, income brackets, and backgrounds speak a common language. The isolation that had hollowed out my days began to recede as my network of riding acquaintances expanded.

None of this made me invincible. But together, these “vitamins” pushed me steadily away from the low, neutral gear of languishing.

Risk, Money, and Who Gets to Ride

To write about motorcycles as a route to flourishing without acknowledging their risks would be irresponsible.

Even the best-trained rider on a well-maintained bike is vulnerable to inattentive drivers, road debris, mechanical failure, and weather. Over months of riding, I collected the usual catalogue of close calls: a driver changing lanes into my space without checking, loose gravel on an unexpectedly tight corner, a sudden thunderstorm on the highway.

Other riders’ stories were more sobering. John, whom I met at an advanced training course, recounted the intersection where a distracted driver turned left across his path. He woke up days later with a repaired leg and a hazy memory of being airlifted to hospital. He returned to riding, but with a new mission: volunteering as a mentor in beginner courses, drilling hazard awareness into nervous students until it became instinct.

Risk can push people in different directions. For some, a crash or a near miss is reason enough to quit. For others, it sharpens their respect for training, gear, and restraint. I found myself drawn to the second camp. I upgraded my helmet, invested in CE-rated armour, and became the sort of rider who treats every intersection as if no one has seen them.

There are financial barriers as well. A decent starter bike, quality gear, insurance, maintenance, and training add up quickly. I mitigated costs where I could—buying some gear second-hand, learning to do basic service myself—but there is no way to make motorcycling truly cheap. For many people, especially in urban centres with high living costs, a bike remains a discretionary luxury.

There are cultural barriers too. For decades, motorcycling in North America has skewed heavily male and, in many regions, overwhelmingly white. That is slowly shifting. Women now own a significant minority of motorcycles, and grassroots groups have emerged to create safer, more inclusive spaces for riders of colour and LGBTQ riders. On long trips, I met retirees fulfilling long-postponed dreams, young tradespeople commuting year-round, nurses, teachers, software engineers. The stereotypes—loud pipes, louder personalities—still exist, but they no longer define the whole.

Friends and family remained sceptical, at least at first. Some dismissed my new interest as a phase. Others worried, with reason, about safety. I did not try to convert them. Instead, I let the results speak. As my mood improved, as my conversations grew less flat, their objections softened. They may never ride; they now at least understand why I do.

Roads That Rewired Me

After a season of local rides, I set my sights on longer distances. Travel, researchers have noted, can sharpen creativity and self-awareness by breaking routine. Doing it on a motorcycle intensifies everything: exposure, fatigue, satisfaction, risk.

One of my first extended trips was along the Blue Ridge Parkway in the United States, a road famed among riders for its curves and views. The speed limit is modest, the pavement generally good, and the vistas theatrical. At one overlook, I stopped before dawn and watched as the Appalachian hills shifted from indistinct shadow to layered, blue-green ridges. The bike ticked quietly as its engine cooled. I thought back, involuntarily, to the version of myself for whom making the bed had once felt like an unreasonable demand.

Later, I turned north to ride the Cabot Trail in Nova Scotia, a loop of road that clings to cliffs and slips through small coastal communities. There, I met a retired teacher crossing Canada in stages, one province per summer, and a former long-haul truck driver who had traded eighteen wheels for two. They spoke less about scenery than about a particular quality of feeling: the sense, as one put it, “that you’re back in the story of your own life.”

These trips did not repair the world, resolve my anxieties about the future, or erase ordinary stresses. They did loosen something that had become constricted. In retrospect, the kilometres were less important than the decision to incur them: to leave, to keep going when it rained, to adapt when plans shifted. Those are the same muscles required to navigate any uncertain landscape, psychological or otherwise.

Motorcycles and the North American Imagination

My personal journey unfolded alongside broader shifts in how motorcycling is understood in North America.

The post-war era framed bikes as instruments of rebellion and release. Later decades layered on new meanings: Harley-Davidson’s resurgence in the 1980s as an emblem of blue-collar authenticity and, paradoxically, affluent nostalgia; the rise of Japanese sportbikes as symbols of youth, speed, and sometimes reckless excess; the emergence of adventure and dual-sport machines as tools for long-distance exploration.

Today, the picture is more complicated. Environmental concerns and traffic congestion have prompted advocacy groups to argue that motorcycles can, under the right conditions, ease gridlock and reduce emissions. Organisations such as Ride to Work, Inc. campaign for commuting on two wheels as a practical, not just romantic, choice. Debates over lane-splitting and lane-filtering—allowing motorcycles to move between lanes of slow or stopped traffic—illustrate the tension between efficiency, safety, and cultural norms.

Technology is reshaping the landscape as well. Electric motorcycles, once curiosities, now represent a small but growing slice of the market. Companies like Zero Motorcycles offer machines that swap vibration and exhaust for smooth torque and near silence. Range limitations and charging infrastructure remain obstacles, but the direction of travel is clear: the archetypal rider of North American imagination may soon share the road with someone whose machine emits nothing at all.

As these shifts play out, the core appeal of motorcycling remains remarkably stable. It is still about exposure—to weather, to consequence, to geography—and about a degree of agency that can be hard to find in more padded lives.

Advice for the Languishing and Motorcycle-Curious

Motorcycling pulled me out of languishing. That does not mean it will, or should, do the same for everyone.

If you are struggling with your mental health, professional help—therapy, counselling, sometimes medication—may be more important than any hobby. Motorcycles are not treatment. They are, at best, one piece of a broader life that includes support, rest, and honest conversation.

If you are mentally stable but dulled, and find yourself drawn to the idea of riding, there are ways to explore it thoughtfully.

Start with training. A certified safety course is non-negotiable. It provides structured, supervised exposure to risk and a chance to decide, before buying a bike, whether the experience aligns with your temperament.
Invest in gear. A well-fitted helmet, proper jacket and trousers with armour, gloves, and boots are essential. They are not decorations; they are your second skin.
Be honest about money. A used, well-maintained first bike often makes more sense than something new and aspirational. Learn basic maintenance. Get multiple insurance quotes.
Respect your limits. Progression in riding should be gradual. Extending your comfort zone is healthy; blowing past it to impress others is not.
Combine riding with other supports. Exercise, sleep, friendships, and, when needed, professional care form the foundation. The bike sits on top of that, not in place of it.

The goal is not to find a glamorous escape, but to cultivate an activity that quietly expands your capacity to cope and to feel.

The Continuum

Today, my life looks ordinary on paper. I work, pay bills, worry about the same things many people do: aging parents, economic uncertainty, the state of the world. There are days when I wake up tired, when problems at work stack up faster than I can clear them, when my mind drifts back towards old, familiar patterns.

The difference is that I no longer feel trapped in a single state.

On a good weekend, I plan a route and ride with friends through farm roads that smell of fresh-cut hay, or along a lakeshore where the light changes every minute. On a busy weeknight, I may only have time for a brief loop at dusk, the city slipping past in streaks of sodium light. Even those short rides serve as a kind of reset. They confirm, repeatedly, that I can still choose motion.

Keyes is careful to point out that flourishing is not a permanent designation. It is a position on a continuum that can shift with circumstance. I do not consider myself “cured” of languishing. What I have now is a set of practices—riding among them—that makes it harder for stagnation to take root unnoticed.

Coda: Leaning In

There is a moment in every unfamiliar corner on a motorcycle when the road bends away and you must decide whether to trust your preparation. You cannot see the entire turn. You do not know, with certainty, what waits beyond the apex. But if you stay upright and rigid, fixated on the worst-case scenario, you will run wide. The correct response is counterintuitive: you look where you want to go, you lean into the uncertainty, and the bike follows.

During the darkest months of the pandemic, I felt as if I had run out of road. Languishing convinced me that life would continue indefinitely in that muted register. Enrolling in a safety course was a small, almost private act of defiance against that assumption.

The kilometres that followed did not make life easier. They made it larger. They reintroduced risk, sensation, and community into a life that had grown narrow. They reminded me that movement—literal and metaphorical—is not a guarantee of happiness, but it is a strong antidote to stagnation.

Not everyone will find their way to flourishing on two wheels. Some will find it in painting, in mountain trails, in volunteering, in raising children, in building companies, in music. The particulars matter less than the pattern: stepping out of the comfortable rut, embracing the vulnerability of being a beginner, and building a life that contains more than survival.

For me, that pattern is written in engine notes, weather forecasts, and maps. The road ahead remains uncertain, as it does for everyone. The difference now is simple: when it bends out of sight, I am willing to lean.

Sidebar: A Short Glossary for New Riders

Friction zone: The narrow range of clutch lever movement where power begins to transfer from the engine to the rear wheel. Mastery here is key to smooth starts and low-speed control.
Counter-steering: The technique of briefly steering opposite to the desired direction of turn at speed—pressing forward on the right handlebar to initiate a right-hand lean, for example. It feels odd at first and becomes instinctive.
CE-rated armour: Impact protectors in jackets, trousers, and gloves that meet European safety standards. They are designed to absorb and distribute energy in a crash.
Lane-splitting / lane-filtering: Riding between lanes of slow or stopped traffic. Legal in some jurisdictions under specific conditions, prohibited in others, and the subject of ongoing debate.

Sidebar: Where to Start if You’re Curious

Motorcycle Safety Foundation (MSF) – North American leader in rider training, with structured beginner and advanced courses.
American Motorcyclist Association (AMA) – Advocacy, events, and community for riders in the United States.
Canada Safety Council – Offers rider training and safety guidance tailored to Canadian conditions and licensing systems.
Ride to Work, Inc. – Promotes the environmental and social benefits of commuting by motorcycle or scooter.

Sidebar: A Compressed Timeline of North American Motorcycling

Late 1940s – Post-war riding clubs form; motorcycles offer camaraderie and adrenaline to returning veterans.
1953 – The Wild One popularizes the image of the outlaw biker.
1969 – Easy Rider cements the association between motorcycles and counterculture.
1970s – Formalized safety training expands, including the establishment of dedicated rider-education organisations.
1980s – Harley-Davidson repositions itself as a premium icon; Japanese manufacturers popularize agile sportbikes.
2000s–2010s – Adventure and dual-sport bikes gain prominence; riding communities diversify.
Today – The digital age, demographic change, and electric propulsion signal a more global, eco-conscious, and inclusive era.

Sidebar: Numbers Behind the Story

During the early pandemic, national surveys in the United States indicated that roughly 40% of adults reported symptoms of anxiety or depression at some point—a sharp rise from pre-pandemic levels.
Industry surveys suggest that women now account for close to one in five motorcycle owners in the United States, up from less than one in ten in the late 1990s.
Research using physiological measures has found that riding can increase alertness and reduce certain stress-related biomarkers, supporting what many riders report anecdotally: they feel calmer and more focused after a ride.
Many dealerships reported notable increases in first-time buyers between 2020 and 2021, as people sought new ways to structure their time, find safe recreation, or commute differently.

Moto Curious Magazine