Regardless of the field, clubs are always healthy and active at first, but as time passes it always seems to follow the same pattern
of splitting apart and falling into factions and dissolving. In that process, instead of a productive split where people have honest discussions or
acknowledge differences in direction and part ways amicably, misunderstandings and baseless assumptions pile up, personal attacks fly, and you end up seeing all kinds of
ugly stuff—money problems, drinking problems, romantic (male/female) problems, drunken outbursts, and so on.
As a club grows and hits around 30-50 members, all kinds of different people from every walk of life gather.
Cycling clubs, running clubs, hiking clubs, and so on—
the club activity itself rarely causes big problems.
The problem comes after the activity ends—once you go eat or grab a beer together afterward, everyone gets comfortable, starts calling each other hyung/dongsaeng/oppa/noona, drops formalities and hangs out,
heads to a second round at a karaoke room or a pub, and that's when the real bonding starts.
And on top of that, whenever it's someone's birthday, regardless of the club's original purpose, people's actual day jobs come up.
A runs a pub
B runs a few franchise cafes
C is a car salesman
D runs a bakery café
E works at a law firm
F is an academy instructor
G is a gym trainer
H is a licensed real estate agent
I is a computer expert
As everyone talks about their own line of work, it naturally starts to take on the character of a mutual-aid society.
Looking at a few situations:
A: I'm thinking of changing cars soon...C, does your company have any promotions going?...can you hook me up somehow?
C, staying within a range where he doesn't personally lose out (or conversely, even if he takes home a bit less than what he'd normally earn), finalizes A's car deal for him.
C: We need to take our staff out for dinner and then a second round, should we go to A hyung's place? He'll probably load us up with extra service, right?
A hyung, it's a group dinner with 12 of our staff, we're thinking of going to your place for drinks...
Situations like this, where it's mutually beneficial—helping out each other's livelihood, buying and selling stuff from a "friend I know" or a "hyung I know"—
are genuinely helpful, and since a club is ultimately an extension of your social network, it's a good thing while it's good.
But the problem is, there always comes a point where this falls apart.
G asked E, who works at a law firm, for legal advice and got help.
But in the end, things didn't work out the way G wanted, and he ends up taking something of a loss.
So G says something resentful to E.
But E never even formally took the case—he just offered advice within what he was reasonably able to do—yet things play out as if the bad outcome
happened because of E.
Once things split apart like this at the break-even point, it turns into an emotional fight, and relationships that used to be hyung/dongsaeng, unnie/oppa
turn into "hey," "you," "yah," and eventually into "that guy," "this guy."
There are even cases where someone gets overeager about fixing a punctured carbon rim tubular for someone, uses a steel-core tire lever to remove the tire, ends up shattering the carbon rim,
and then everyone gets exhausted arguing over who has to pay for it.
(Carbon rims really do sometimes crack from using a steel-core lever...especially back in the rim-brake era)
And there are cases of people pulling out their phone to take a photo during a pack ride, wobbling, and crashing, causing more exhaustion and drama.
Anyway, all kinds of bizarre incidents keep happening,
and honestly, it's just the pattern of "focusing more and more on eating, drinking, and hanging out" that ends up steering things in a bad direction
and I've even seen shops that partnered with clubs to run their business end up in chaos because of it.
Not always the case, but when a diverse group of people gather, they always seem to lose their original intent and pour their energy into the wrong things, and eventually
scatter and leave with nothing but bad blood between them—I've seen this happen so many times that
it seems like a lot of people end up riding alone or with just a small group in the end.
If people have that much energy to spare, I think it'd be better spent pooling membership fees to do a group buy on something like Sena/Bikecom for group-ride safety, paying more attention to preventing accidents,
or gathering to focus on bike skills and basic know-how (changing a tube, using tubeless plugs, replacing a chain link, hand signals)
rather than the stuff above...that's just what I think.
