“Not Everyone Has the Luxury of Going Out and Suffering in the Mountains”: Is Outdoor Culture a Bourgeois Thing?
Over the past decade, outdoor culture has become a kind of cultural default: trail running, climbing, bikepacking, hiking. Mathias Riquier rode from Munich to Ljubljana, worked in the outdoor industry, and accumulated four bikes and more clothes than he could ever need. Then he started asking himself what he was really running from. In Enfermés dehors. L’outdoor et la capture du désir d’évasion (Locked Outside: Outdoor Culture and the Capture of Our Desire to Escape), the journalist takes apart a consumer culture he sees as bourgeois and exclusionary—and argues that freedom may lie somewhere else entirely. A conversation that might knock you off your saddle.
Vertige Media: What made you want to write this book?
Mathias Riquier: It wasn’t one single thing. I started hearing people close to me say, “There’s definitely something going on here. It’s crazy how much we feel like we’re supposed to be doing this.” I realized other people were feeling the same discomfort I was. Before that, it was easy to dismiss it and tell myself, “Come on, Mathias, you’re just overthinking this by yourself.” Then I felt like I’d reached a point where I couldn’t ignore it anymore. I had enough material. I was still working in the outdoor industry at the time. I couldn’t just leave the subject sitting there in front of me. Once something in my life starts losing its magic, I need to follow that feeling all the way through.
I think the desire to escape is completely legitimate. We’re overloaded from every direction—mentally, politically. The problem is that outdoor culture presents itself as a ready-made answer to that problem.
There was also a more concrete turning point. In 2022, I went on a bike trip in Slovenia with a friend who’s a very strong rider. To get to the starting point, I rode solo from Munich to Ljubljana through the Alps. By the time I got there, I’d already burned through 90 percent of what I had in the tank. We rode together for one day. That night, I threw up, cried, got on a bus, and went home.
That was probably the furthest I’d ever taken that constant need to keep pushing. I had chosen the destination because we both knew, without ever saying it, that we’d be able to make the trip look spectacular on Instagram. That really made me stop and ask myself: Why am I putting myself in situations like this? What’s the point of any of it?
Vertige Media: Outdoor culture presents itself as a path to freedom and authenticity. What bothers you about that message?
Mathias Riquier: I think the desire to escape is completely legitimate. And I don’t mean escape in the Club Med vacation sense. I mean breaking out of prison. That desire comes from something very real. We’re overloaded from every direction—mentally, politically. There are all kinds of reasons people feel trapped in the lives they’ve been handed. The problem is that outdoor culture presents itself as a ready-made answer to that problem. And in the end, it may make people more unhappy than happy. Poorer, too, because it costs a lot of money.
More importantly, there are people who feel that same desire to escape but don’t have access to this particular solution. A whole lot of people were never invited to the party.
Vertige Media: How did activities rooted in an almost anti-establishment culture become part of the system?
Mathias Riquier: It’s been a slow process, unfolding over 150 or 200 years. But more recently, brands like The North Face and Patagonia have revived that countercultural language. At the end of the day, though, what they’re mostly selling is social distinction. When you buy a tent that essentially tells you, “With me, you’ll be free,” you’re buying into an identity that separates you from the person who goes to Club Med. Bourdieu was saying this a long time ago: We define ourselves more by what disgusts us than by what we like. When I got into bike travel, I was exactly like that. You’re broadcasting your individuality: “I’m different. Look at what I’m doing.” Except all the numbers say otherwise. I felt that contradiction very strongly. I was convinced I was doing something unique. Then I realized I was wearing the same clothes as everyone else, spending the same ridiculous amount of money as everyone else, and had just as little savings as everyone else. By then I had already bought four bikes and about 50 billion pieces of clothing. Basically, I fell for the whole thing.
Outdoor culture, broadly speaking, isn’t a collective epic. Maybe that isn’t an accident.
Vertige Media: Has outdoor culture changed?
Mathias Riquier: We’ve entered the era of performing ourselves online, with Strava, Instagram, TikTok. In a major way. Suddenly, we had these incredibly easy tools for curating our image, and outdoor sports turned out to be very useful for that. Climate change plays a role, too. In circles with a lot of cultural capital, hiking through natural landscapes has become much more desirable than driving 750 miles to Benidorm. Instagram didn’t create outdoor culture. It supercharged it. The whole machinery of personal storytelling and self-improvement fits perfectly with the older ideals of outdoor culture—the idea that you go on some inner journey and come back transformed. Outdoor culture, broadly speaking, isn’t a collective epic. Maybe that isn’t an accident.
Vertige Media: So how exactly is outdoor culture exclusionary?
Mathias Riquier: First, there’s what we call gatekeeping. In a community of 100 people, there are always 15 or 20 who really hold the keys. They’re often the organizers, the people who have some say over who gets in and who stays out. That’s the “scene”—the inner core, what I call the yolk. It’s where the accepted codes get created, where the contacts and partnerships end up. That core generates coolness, so of course I want to be part of it. But getting in is hard because I’m not cool enough. And once I finally make it inside, I want to shut the door on everyone waiting behind me, because otherwise there will be 102 of us, then 103. I experienced that very clearly in the Paris cycling scene. I always found it incredibly hard to navigate. And I’ve talked about it with enough people to know I’m not the only one.
Vertige Media: What are the main mechanisms behind that exclusion?
Mathias Riquier: There are two major barriers: money and culture. The clothes, climbing shoes, carabiners, derailleurs—all that gear carries both technical knowledge and social meaning. To understand the vocabulary and know how to use the equipment, you first need access to the equipment. And the equipment is expensive. The industry keeps that barrier to entry in place. Beyond money, there’s also the simple fact that some people don’t even feel like any of this is meant for them. The ads, the stories, the media—they don’t speak to everyone. I can’t wait for the day there’s a big outdoor festival in Bobigny. But I don’t think that day is coming anytime soon.
Vertige Media: Is that gatekeeping deliberate?
Mathias Riquier: I don’t want to say whether it’s conscious or unconscious, because I genuinely don’t know. Maybe some people lie in bed at night thinking, “I’m going to keep those people out so I can have my outdoor castle all to myself.” Other people do it in much subtler ways. I think I was probably one of them. These are bourgeois communities of outdoor participants closing the door on people who don’t have the money and who may not even feel like the activity is meant for them in the first place. For the industry, the choices are much more pragmatic. It targets people who have enough money to buy the clothes.
That doesn’t stop companies from doing a little social washing sometimes—putting people of color in an ad while continuing to sell to exactly the same audience. Basically, it buys them a better image.
When people say, ‘You just need to get outside,’ you can’t say that to someone who doesn’t have that luxury. That’s one of the things that frustrates me most about this whole message. It assumes a level of mental and physical bandwidth that not everyone has.
Vertige Media: In the book, you talk about “cognitive time.” What do you mean by that?
Mathias Riquier: Not everyone has the luxury of going out and suffering in the mountains.
Being able to trail run, surf, or mountain bike depends on having enough room in your life to do it. And that room comes from a certain level of material comfort, along with having a light enough emotional and mental load that you can actually enjoy yourself. I’m convinced that someone who works on their feet all day and comes home exhausted isn’t going to go run around Annecy, because they simply don’t have that option. It isn’t about willpower.
When people say, “You just need to get outside,” you can’t say that to someone who doesn’t have that luxury. That’s one of the things that frustrates me most about this whole message. It assumes a level of mental and physical bandwidth that not everyone has.
Vertige Media: Outdoor culture often presents itself as a counterculture. Why don’t you see it that way?
Mathias Riquier: In outdoor culture, everyone agrees with everyone else. A real counterculture needs three things: an explicitly political direction, its own spaces for producing ideas and discourse, and a willingness to openly deal with internal conflict.
It’s been a very long time since I’ve seen an outdoor fanzine that genuinely says, “We do outdoor sports, and we’re antifascist, we’re political.” The whole culture is incredibly depoliticized and incredibly polished. What remains is basically the look of being on the margins. To paraphrase Bourdieu, a cultural system that preserves itself by keeping the seeds of revolution at a distance, as a way of maintaining social distinction, is a bourgeois cultural system. That sentence almost sums up the entire book.
Vertige Media: And yet outdoor culture seems more desirable than ever. Why?
Mathias Riquier: Because it’s offered to us as a way to figure out who we are and where we stand socially. It gives us positive values to identify with in a world we experience as increasingly anxiety-inducing. And it gives you a very strong sense of agency. In other words: I decide. I can go right, left, straight ahead. I can do whatever I want. I genuinely found that feeling in outdoor sports myself. I’m not saying it’s fake. But we also put on the codes that come with it: the same clothes, the same language, the same stories about our own personal adventures. We become little messengers for a worldview that isn’t really ours. And by doing that, we help keep the outdoor recreation complex running at full speed.
Stepping away from outdoor culture makes it possible to see the world outside not as some empty playground, but as a political space—a place people are fighting over.
Vertige Media: Is there an ideology behind the book? Your notes draw heavily on left-wing and even anarchist thought.
Mathias Riquier: I spent a lot of time wondering how explicitly I wanted to say that while promoting the book, versus just letting it come through naturally. But yes. The most progressive people in outdoor culture tend to approach things from a very social-democratic perspective: the system isn’t great, so let’s try to make it a little gentler. We create rental programs, make access easier. I tend to think about these things in a more anarchist, more revolutionary way. Well, revolutionary is a strong word. Do I want to go burn down outdoor gear factories? No. But my thinking is roughly half Marxist and half Bourdieusian. I believe ideas and narratives come out of very specific material conditions. If you weren’t bourgeois to begin with, you can’t just say, “If you want it badly enough, you can do it,” or “You just need to get outside.” That argument doesn’t hold up.
Vertige Media: So how do we break free from what you call “the capture of our desire to escape”?
Mathias Riquier: The answer isn’t inside outdoor culture. You have to step back another level.
I think we need to ask questions like: What are we trying to fill inside ourselves when we do these activities? And what else could we do to meet those needs in ways that are more political and more collective? There’s one thing I think about a lot. We travel through these incredible places where there are real issues, struggles, and conflicts over how land is used. Then we hop on a TGV, France’s high-speed train, go home, and say, “Fuck, that was beautiful.” I find that astonishing. Stepping away from outdoor culture makes it possible to see the world outside not as some empty playground, but as a political space—a place people are fighting over. Mainstream outdoor culture turns free time into useful time: something measurable, trackable, something you can turn into value. Wandering brings back unproductive time and chance. It creates different possibilities for meaning. The freedom we’re looking for isn’t somewhere far away in an imagined wilderness. It’s right here, inside us and around us, whatever kind of terrain we happen to have.
Read: Enfermés dehors. L’outdoor et la capture du désir d’évasion, Éditions Divergences, 2026, 200 pages, €17.
