Golf and the 4 Stages of Mankind
This past weekend, my cousin asked his close friends to play golf with him before his wedding.
Now, I hate golf with the same intensity that a jihadist hates the idea of “the West”. But I love my cousin and it was an obligation. So, we played the front nine.
Of all the sports we humans play, I imagine that aliens would be most confused by golf.
The sport requires taking 150 acres often in the middle of an urban area that could go towards all sorts of productive uses and turning it into a meticulously manicured lawn that needs tens of thousands of man hours and 200 million gallons of water a year to maintain.
We create this elaborate lawn so that a few dozen people for a few months out of the year can wander around it searching for a white ball they just hit.
I never got why society allowed this to be a thing.
That is until I played that day. As we played, I began to “get it.”
It wasn’t that I got it in the sense of developing a deep love for the game – I got it in the sense that I began to understand why golf exists.
You see within our motley crew, the only thing that correlated to whether you were good – was not how athletic you were – but rather how progressed you were on the family front. Our best golfer looked like a grizzled out of shape gold miner from the 1840s, but he had a wife and two kids which meant that he was awesome at golf.
Golf and sleep are alike.
Sleep is something that on the surface doesn’t make sense. Why did we evolve to be inert for one third of the day?
For something this costly to exist, it must confer some massive benefit.
Scientists have discovered sleep is what allows the massive machinery of the central nervous system to cleanse itself of the myelin sheath, which builds up each day (see here). Unless we sleep, we can’t have big brains – the benefit outweighs the cost.
Golf likewise seems silly, but it serves a critical purpose. Golf is the only way men of a certain age can routinely get away from their families without getting into trouble.
If this activity didn’t exist, middle-aged men would implode into homicidal violence, despair.
Now, this leads to the next question – why is going crazy and killing people the default move for middle aged men?
To understand this, you must understand the Four Ages of Men.
The First Age of Man – the one that we spent 98% of our evolutionary history in – was the killing things with your friends phase of existence.
When the first modern man arrived on the scene 300,000 years ago till about 6,000 years ago, you woke up and roamed the nearby area killing animals with your other guy friends.
Since this is what we did for the vast majority of our evolutionary existence, we grew to really innately like it. If you didn’t dig it, you probably didn’t survive.
The Second Age of Man began with agriculture, and this is when man spent his day using animals to do things for him.
Instead of finding and killing them, we used animals to plow fields, or we tended to them in flocks and then killed them. We sometimes did this with friends but mostly with our family. This era is most of our recorded history – up until the start of the Industrial Revolution in Europe in the late 18th century.
The Third Age of Man involved man using machines to do things that animals used to do. We had horsepower instead of actual horses. In this age, men woke up and went to factories. We’re now divorced from nature but still in touch with some sort of physical reality.
The Fourth Age of Man began roughly fifty years ago and this is where machines went from replacing human physical power to replacing human mental power. We are entirely remote from the physical world – no longer working the earth or killing animals. We type language into an interface called a computer.
Even though we have achieved progress, modern life makes us innately depressed. A day spent using excel doesn’t feel as satisfying as killing a boar and bringing that home to feed the kids.
And this is where golf comes into play.
Golf is a fake re-creation of a day in the life of the First Age.
The first thing to note about golf is that golf courses are savannah-like. They are grasslands with occasional trees and obstacles. Savanah environments offer places to hide and things to see – which is perfect for a species that was both prey and predator. “When humans are offered a choice of landscapes, people react most positively to savanna-like settings, a finding that is consistent across every culture studied” (see here).
When you play golf with your guy friends, you are in a pack that is moving the way ancient human hunting packs used to move. The four of you start out together surveying the landscape and then you fan out searching before coming back together. This is exactly how we hunted for millennia.
The other thing golf does is allow you to be with a guy for a few hours without having to look him in the eye. Guys do not feel comfortable sitting across from one another and analyzing each other’s facial expressions, but rather in side-by-side framing.
As Sociologist Harry Brod puts it “Numerous studies have established that men are more likely to define emotional closeness as working or playing side-by-side, while women often view it as talking face-to-face. Men, for example, derive intimacy from playing and watching sports” (see here).
So, golf allows you to have a pretend ancient hunting experience with a group of guy friends for a few hours a day where you can converse without having to stare at each other in the face. You get to do all the things that a First Age guy did.
Now maybe every type of guy needs the golf experience, but it is particularly important for married guys.
You see single guys at least have faux hunting experiences – going out to bars and picking up women – usually doing this with packs of other men. Married guys can’t do that and so they find themselves working a job in the digital age that is not only divorced from killing things but also from nature and from the physical world, and while they enjoy comfortable lives, their evolutionary psychology is screaming at them that this isn’t right – that they were made for something better than this.
One option is to go join the single guys in hunting for women and risk your family, or golf.
Golf is the soothing cure for that cognitive dissonance.
We can’t go back to Neolithic times, but we can create fake savannah pastures that give us a faux-hunting experience that even a fat middle-aged accountant can be good it.