René Scavington describes the evolution of parkour culture as a story of obvious progress. Early parkour communities were “a little meaner,” he says. Try something playful or experimental—a different hand placement, an unusual grab—and “it would just get hated on so much.” Now? Experimentation is embraced, even celebrated. Post something playful on Instagram and it gets love. This is clearly better, right?

“I’m just happy that it’s more accepted in parkour now that like experimentation is just more accepted. So I’m trying to embrace it.”

The narrative makes sense: gatekeeping bad, acceptance good. Communities that punish deviation are toxic; communities that celebrate exploration are healthy. Who wants to defend the mean early days?

But what if something valuable lived in that constraint?

Not the meanness itself—there’s nothing to romanticize about making people feel terrible for trying things. But consider what happened when trying something “a little odd” meant risking social judgment. The friction created a different relationship with experimentation. You had to believe in what you were trying. You had to be willing to defend it, at least to yourself. The stakes meant something.

When experimentation carries no social cost, when everything playful gets celebrated, experimentation itself changes. It becomes performance. The weird hand placement isn’t just between you and the movement anymore—it’s content, it’s engagement, it’s validation. The question shifts from “what happens if I try this?” to “how will this be received?”

This isn’t a call to bring back the mean days. But the shift from constraint to celebration isn’t purely addition—it’s also substitution. We gained freedom to explore without fear of judgment. What did we trade for it?

Maybe the answer is in what experimentation means when everyone’s doing it. In the early parkour communities Scavington describes, trying something odd marked you as willing to break from the established way. It signaled something about your relationship to the practice—that you’d risk social standing to follow curiosity. When experimentation becomes the norm, when it’s expected and celebrated, it can no longer signal that willingness. The choice to experiment stops being a choice at all.

This shows up in how practitioners talk about their own work. Listen for the language: “just messing around,” “just playing with,” “just experimenting.” The qualifier “just” appears everywhere, as if to preemptively diminish the thing before anyone else can. But you don’t say “just” when you’re genuinely experimenting in private. You say it when experimentation has become social performance and you need to manage expectations.

The irony is that real experimentation—the kind that genuinely explores unknown territory rather than performs exploration—might actually be harder now than it was in those meaner communities. At least then, the decision to try something odd meant something. You were choosing to step outside accepted practice despite social cost. Now? You’re choosing to step outside… nothing. There’s no clear boundary to cross, no resistance to push against, no way to know if you’re actually exploring or just doing what’s expected.

None of this means parkour should return to gatekeeping and judgment. But maybe the story isn’t as simple as “acceptance is better.” Maybe what we’re learning is that communities need both: enough openness that people feel safe to explore, but enough constraint that exploration retains meaning. The challenge isn’t choosing between mean and accepting. It’s figuring out how to maintain the significance of experimentation without requiring social punishment to give it weight.

This field note references the Movers Mindset podcast episode “Resilient with René Scavington,” published January 10, 2024.