Happy New Year from Bike Thailand

Let's face it: Most of us take ourselves way too seriously. This is downright laughable, especially when we step back and take an honest look at ourselves. The lot of us, Homo sapiens – modified monkeys, bipedal primates who have afforded ourselves a ridiculously lofty position atop the great ape family.

Among our apparent higher-level thought processes is one of our biggest strengths and weaknesses: our seemingly unparalleled sense of self-awareness. This capacity has engendered all humans with varying levels of ego and vanity – characteristics that continually cloud our view of ourselves as individually inconsequential organisms.

We mountain bikers are among the most preposterous examples of the self-centeredness of our species, diagramming ourselves into largely superficial sub-categories based on riding styles and preferences. Downhillers, XC types, dirt jumpers, singlespeeders – all subconsciously believing in the inherent superiority of our self-adopted tribes.

Almost all of us adorn ourselves with clothing that we associate with our preferred tribe – some of it functional, some not. At the core of our textile-buying decisions is the conviction that wearing our choses style of clothing will necessarily make us 'cooler,' though such designations are both ephemeral and subjective, merely illustrating a narcissistic mindset rather than some sort of objective reality. Viewed this way, coolness truly is nothing more than a state of mind.

We routinely spend ridiculous amounts of money on bikes and components that we hope will help us perform better within our favorite disciplines. And while riding bikes that are best suited to our preferred terrain is certainly important, it can't change the fact that some primates are simply physically and athletically superior to others and can ride better across the spectrum of conditions regardless of what bike they're riding.

A significant percentage of mountain bikers can't help but engage in the primitive practice of asserting dominance on the trail, at the trailhead or in the local bike shop. Not entirely unlike the opening scene in Planet of the Apes, we vibe each other with psychological tactics, verbal slurs and demonstrations of skill: climbing, descending and jumping better than others to establish our respective supremacy.

We're so caught up in our own bullshit that we somehow delude ourselves into believing it, and in the process we fail to see what we really are – chimps doing tricks on two wheels. Happy New Year and next year we do it all again... promise.