When Riding a Motorcycle Doesn't Feel Fun Anymore

DanF9 | Dec 8, 2025 — There’s a moment a lot of riders don’t like to talk about. And I have a feeling that every rider goes through something similar at some point. It's not the first thing you bring up at the coffee pitstop. It's quieter than that. It creeps up on you the more time passes; like rust on a washer, spreading onto the bolt and finally making itself visible when the damage is done.

It’s the ride where you take your helmet off, look at the bike you were supposed to be in love with, and think:

…I’m not actually having fun.

Kind of awkward when often times, your entire personality has been built around being a Motorcycle Person™. But in all honesty, since I know I can't speak for all of you, I'll start with my story.

The Time Riding Lost Its Fun

I used to think step 1 of motorcycling was choosing a "side." Was I a cruiser guy, a sportbike guy, an off-road guy? Like picking a Hogwarts house, but paying more insurance premiums depending on the choice.

The process, summarized:

You try a few bikes in your licensing course, watch some YouTube, develop a crush on a certain silhouette and suddenly you’re "pretty sure" you know who you are.

I knew I liked bikes that felt nimble and sporty, and I knew I’d be riding mostly on the street, so I bought an MT-07 (they called it an FZ-07 in those days). Light, torquey, fun. On paper it looked like the Platonic ideal of "my kind of bike."

But the road isn't some shadow on the wall of some Athenian cave... I then had to meet a little something called: the real world.

In the real world, I was doing a lot more freeway than I’d imagined. All that naked-bike charm translated to a stiff neck from being used as a human sail. Basically, tiring myself out before arriving at the place where the actual fun began.

After a few hours in the saddle my ass clocked out and went somewhere else spiritually. I couldn’t explore the gravel roads around campgrounds without feeling like I was about to auger myself into the scenery. Even in the city, the torque that I spent so much time optimizing (exhaust, dyna tune, fuel controller, etc.) turned into a personality flaw when I got cut off and felt anger spool up in the right wrist.

The image, the shadow on that wall of Plato's cave was telling me:

You’re a sporty naked-bike guy who carves city streets and backroads.

But the world outside the cave was saying:

You’re tense, tired, and slightly terrified.

At some point, riding stopped being fun, and I quietly, even angrily wondered if motorcycling wasn’t for me. Every ride built up a form of tension, with no resolution or peace in sight.

The Trap I Fell Into

I sat in my cave for a while. It was uncomfortable, like realizing a relationship you brag about to your friends might actually be making you miserable. Even worse, that it's some projection or fantasy that's leading you down a path of self-sabotage, anxiety... dissonance.

Thing is, I love motorcycling. I can't abandon it like it's "some other hobby." There was a time when it centred me, when it improved my quality of life. Surely, that's not all lost? Surely, that part was real?

What was wrong was the way I was doing it, trying to adhere to some idea of myself I had constructed in the cavernous depths of my imagination. Because it was "cool," because it made me look like I knew what I was doing...

It's just a trap: it confuses the idea of ourselves with the experience of ourselves. "I am this kind of rider," we declare, based on a few early impressions and some aspirational aesthetics. Then, when our body and brain start filing complaints, we assume the activity is broken, not the mindset.

When riding doesn’t feel fun anymore, and you know you love the sport, there’s a decent chance you're the one standing squarely in your own way.

What Worked

First, the not-so-heroic part: I admitted it was OK not to have fun.

A motorcycle is a tool. If it’s your only transport, there will be days where its job is simply to get you from A to B. Not every ride has to be transcendent. Giving myself permission for some rides to be "meh" lowered the pressure enough that I could look at the situation without the pressure of some grand realization screaming over everything.

Then I changed the bike.

I swapped the torque rocket for a humble CRF250L dual sport. On paper, it's quite the downgrade. In practice, it changed everything. The taller stance and easy maneuverability made city riding feel less like trying to survive. The cushy suspension meant the infamous potholes of Montreal felt like fun jumps. Gravel roads around campgrounds transformed from "better not" to "why not" and then to "this is the fun part." The bike matched the life I was actually living, not the fantasy I was projecting.

That’s when something clicked: the kind of life you choose to lead quietly decides what kind of motorcycle fits you best. Your commute, your roads, your time, your energy, your risk tolerance. This made me realize that the machine should always exist inside your constraints. If you ignore those constraints, you start to feel this odd dissonance.

What else. I also dropped the idea that there was a moral duty to commute on two wheels.

If a particular kind of riding leaves you mentally wrung out from constant scanning and threat assessment, you don’t get bonus points for pushing through it every day until you hate everything. If the only riding that makes you genuinely happy is doing figure eights in an empty parking lot with some cones, make an event out of it. Invite some friends, have a friendly competition and geek out.

Parking-lot shenanigans might not sound as exciting on paper, so it's easy to dismiss them. But if your nervous system lights up in a good way when you’re practicing low-speed drills or setting up stupid little challenges with friends, why wouldn’t you lean into that?

Next, I had to open up to other styles and environments.

Maybe I’m more of a closed-track person than I thought. Maybe most of my fun is actually in controlled spaces where I can push skills without dodging SUVs. The only way to find out is to experiment instead of clinging to the one vision you had when you first googled "Ryanf9 best beginner bike."

I also realized how much happier I am on emptier roads.

The moment I get out of the city and onto those in-between places where traffic thins and the landscape opens up, my anxiety takes the back seat. So, I started claiming territory. Charming little areas, small towns I like, quiet stretches of nothing that feel like they belong to me. Take friends there, or don’t. Guard them like secrets, or turn them into traditions. The point is to map out the places where riding feels good and visit them on purpose.

On top of that, I started combining my rides with things I already enjoy:

A specific coffee shop, a friend’s house, a park I like, some tiny stream that takes me back. It sounds obvious, but wiring your rides to genuinely pleasant destinations does something behavioural psychologists call conditioning. The ride becomes a thread that connects a string of "good" moments, and your brain gradually files motorcycling under "things that lead to nice experiences" instead of "things that scare the crap out of me."

The flip side is just as important: I try not to ride when I feel unstable, angry, anxious or scatter-brained.

I get how riding could be a coping mechanism, doing it when you need to "cool off." But I try to lessen this type of dependence, try to work through whatever it is that's making me feel unstable, and then contemplate a ride. Feelings go away, your body can't sustain this prolonged stress indefinitely, and you can wait it out enough to get to a place where you can simply: reflect. That's where the bike comes in handy (for me). As a pillar of stability, and not the means by which it's OK to run away and blast off into the night.

What I will say, though, is that a lot of the pressure comes from me. Nobody is demanding that each ride be rid of feeling. There’s a big difference between self-mastery and being emotionally numb. If you treat every feeling as an enemy, you’ll eventually flatten your capacity to enjoy the good ones too.

And then there’s the nuclear option that everyone secretly fears: what if this hobby simply isn’t for you?

You are allowed to walk away. You are allowed to like stuff like MTB or ATV more. You don’t owe anyone a reason why. If, after trying different bikes, different roads, different styles, you realize that your life is better with fewer engine explosions per minute, it's no big deal, it's just you. What you need, what you appreciate, how you feel fulfilled.

I think about quitting all the time. Doesn't mean I have the intention of doing so, but it's important to stop and ask:

Am I still riding in the real world, or am I trying to be something I'm not anymore?

The answer isn’t to cling harder to the original fantasy. It’s to treat the whole thing like a testing ground.

Change

Change the bike. Change the route. Change the time of day. Change who you ride with. Change what you consider a "real" ride. See what happens. Keep what feels right and quietly retire what doesn’t. It's Occam's Razor applied to motorcycling.

Ride for long enough, and you'll find out if your story's just some fantasy, or if it has some truth to it. And if riding doesn’t feel fun anymore, focus on your mindset. Then start adjusting the variables until your inner life starts to line up with the world you experience, day to day, in all its overwhelming complexity.

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A Note From the Author

The counterpoint to this entire article could be: look somewhere to the East. Nobody there really cares how fun a motorcycle is (or it's not their top priority, let's say), but there's still a ton of them on the road. They're fuel-efficient, they cut through traffic, and save a ton of space. Some might say that's enough, and the fun lies in not having the problems one might if they didn't own a motorcycle. Makes me think: perhaps this quest for motorcycling to fulfill you beyond the practical is more of a Western ideal, reinforced by pop culture and all the marketing that went into selling Harleys way back when. It could also just be the different ways we use motorcycles as consumers, in that they are often associated with experiences that extend beyond the monotonous routines of commuting. In the East, I have a feeling that the bike is more of a parenthesis between A and B, closing the gap that leads to the next experience as directly as possible. This could even be a Donald Draper-esque pitch for the Big 4:

Get on with your life. Buy a motorcycle.

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