I HAVE AN 8-by-10 photograph taken of me from the first time I rode a motorcycle. It was the early ’80s, and I was on a red and blue, knobby-tired, Honda Z50 minibike. It was visiting day at White Oaks sleepaway camp, where I spent that entire summer. I hated camp. If you’re not particularly athletic (check) or if you skew a bit antisocial (also check), camp meant spending the summer running around doing things you hated with people you don’t really know. It felt like a prison, maybe minimum security? On visiting day, my parents came up to spring me for a few hours to a roadside country diner. En route, we stopped at a small, oval dirt track where, for 5 bucks, I was able to ride that aforementioned Z50 for 15 laps. I was 9, maybe 10. I’m significantly old(er) now, and I often forget why I’ve walked into a room, but I can recall, right now, with absolute clarity, how I felt that day as I raced around that mini-track. I was physically activated by the speed and potential for real and unhappy consequences, but also emotionally and psychologically turned on by such a sudden and complete engagement with my environment. I was hooked on motorcycles for life.

Motorcycles and I have both changed quite a bit since the ’80s. While my mental development has been a bit less linear, the evolution of motorcycles over the course of the last 40 years has marched on, uninterrupted. They have evolved from a fringe, counterculture pursuit into something normalized, and at times, expected. Like tattoos and hairless cats, motorcycles have moved from the periphery toward the center of culture.

This evolution can be broken down into three distinct but interconnected phases:

1. College or Bust

Somewhere around the late ’70s, early ’80s, the U.S. began moving away from an education system with curricula that included shop classes and vocational training, and moving to a more narrowly focused one where nothing was machined, cut, or welded — the goal became to route everyone toward college. Taking a deep dive into why or how this came to be is a whole other story that likely lands somewhere in the territory of capitalistic shortsightedness.

But if you always want to have a job, be a plumber. Things have to be made and have to be fixed, and much of this fixing and making must happen by hand. Moreover, many people who don’t excel in traditional education — who aren’t good at math, for example — do have other skills, such as the ability to work well with their bodies. Having watched the installation of an entire house full of plumbing during a long renovation, what I can say is that, while these guys may or may not be smarter than I am, they are infinitely more skilled (and, at least in New York City, are able to make a good living). But after the aforementioned paradigm shift in education, these hands-on skills were no longer taught in most schools, so many students who could and would have found fulfilling, satisfying careers doing physical crafting and labor instead found themselves in college, studying topics such as business, marketing, or psychology (I fall into that last bucket).

In other words, as Matthew B. Crawford states in his New York Times essay “The Case for Working With Your Hands”: “Some people are hustled off to college, then to the cubicle, against their own inclinations and natural bents, when they would rather be learning to build things or fix things.”

But you can’t change what you are. So eventually there was a market correction in the form of an intentional exodus from the disengaged informational jobs we were all trained for and enlisted in. But we took with us the competencies acquired while we occupied those roles, including expertise in strategic marketing and communications, user-experience design, and corporate branding. Those skill sets ultimately allowed a foundation to be built for a roguish corporate-hybrid model that would become the motorcycle lifestyle industry. For those who couldn’t disentangle themselves from these positions, we were all quite eager, and financially equipped, to support those who did.

Before this, the branding around motorcycles was a bit sketchy. Although I always wanted a motorcycle, I never wanted to be a biker. Bikers wore oddly cut leather pants that were either littered with decorative neon-green paneling or designed to reveal man’s beastly nether parts. Bikers were also more overtly ill-mannered than I ever cared to be and seemed to lack the ability to whisper. I remember feeling some sense of validation, however, after learning about the show, and — with subsequent runs at the Chicago Field Museum, Guggenheim Bilbao, and Guggenheim Vegas, all prompting unprecedented attendance — it seemed to serve as more than a celebration of motorcycles. As historian Jeremy Packer described, it represented the end of a cycle of demonization and social rejection of motorcyclists.

This was around the time I bought my first motorcycle. It was this combination of motorcycle ownership and the show’s success that broadened my perspective of what motorcycling meant.

I wasn’t alone.

3. Dare Jennings

Motorcycling was changed forever in 2000 when Dare Jennings sold Mambo, his irreverent surfwear line, for $25 million. Too wide-eyed to miss the signs, he would go on to utilize this capital to fund Deus Ex Machina, which opened its first shop in 2005.

Deus Ex Machina (translation: “God from the machine”) is a $35 million-a-year motorcycle lifestyle brand with 22 meticulously curated shops in locations ranging from Venice Beach to Biarritz. Each of their global flagships is cleverly named with a nod to the tribal nature of the community they’ve created: The Mansion of Munificence in Brazil and The Wat of Why in Amsterdam. This community has come to Deus not because the brand sells cool stuff but to worship at their Instagrammable altars of experiential enlightenment.

Each flagship houses a cafe and a retail shop where you can buy reasonably priced motorcycle-adjacent gear, handcrafted surfboards, and a custom motorcycle (if you want to put your name on a two-year wait-list). The bikes are super coveted loss leaders — Ryan Gosling reportedly owns at least one. I can’t imagine Deus producing more than 12 a year. Deus is also now publishing art books and has launched a record label (putting out vinyl, of course). But the essence of Deus has always been experiential. Outside of their stores, they organize events including vintage Porsche drives through the streets of Venice Beach, flat-track racing at Terenzano Speedway in northeastern Italy, tacos and tattoos in Noosa Heads, Australia, and rally riding through the deserts of Tunisia. They document meticulously and publish the content through their channels. Their T-shirts are a flag you fly, and what this flag communicates is super cool. Sometimes proximity to a star is enough to make you shine, especially if that star shines as bright as Deus Ex Machina does.

Deus wasn’t the first to create a motorcycle-centric experiential lifestyle brand; they were just the first to include me (a guy who existed somewhere between neon paneling and leather chaps). Before Deus Ex Machina, there was Harley-Davidson. The historic marquee, with 1,498 dealerships across the world, generates annual sales of nearly $5 billion, which is attributable to the rabid commitment of a loyal following. Harley-Davidson is, by most reasonable measures, doing OK. However, with an aging ridership and a strong organizational resistance to change, it’s not a surprise that Harley-Davidson dealerships continue to close alongside their fajita-sizzling cafes that once featured the comedy of Carrot Top. Deus, alternatively, has attracted the attention of LVMH.

Biological evolution is defined as the cumulative changes that occur in a population over time. The ascendency of Deus, in part facilitated by a rejection of the dissociative, Sisyphean nature of corporate work and further enabled by the success of the Guggenheim exhibit, has, over the last 40 years, elicited a metamorphosis in motorcycle aesthetic, design, and engineering. From the most casual fan to the hardcore weekend warrior wrenching into the wee hours of the morning, hoping for nothing more than an acknowledging nod from another rider on those Sunday-morning backroads, the change has been undeniable.

Additionally, because evolution is ultimately about survival, the success of Deus has provided a commercially viable model for the rest of the custom-motorcycle-builder scene. In an industry whose margins are impossibly unforgiving, Deus has offered an accessible framework for success, one that is achievable with far less than the $25 million that Dare had in the bank when he started Deus. The model not only provides a framework for success, but for many, an antidote to the monotonous tone of modern life.

Many claim that life is about seeking balance, which for those making that claim, may be true. For me, life is about finding your place, discovering who you are and how you fit into the absurdly fantastic moment we’re all living in. In order to find that place, balance may ultimately be what’s sought, but what’s needed to get there is fanatical commitment.

Building custom bikes requires this sort of commitment. It takes years of practice along with a resistant petulance resulting from doing work within a culture that, on the surface at least, doesn’t always socially or emotionally value what you’re doing. These three discriminate moments, however, indicate clearly that no matter how niche your interest in moto culture may be, within that niche exists a community — your community. There are no membership requirements — well, maybe just one: that you are, or are perhaps connected to, someone who’s not going to be told what to do.

In other words, a real motorcyclist.