Greetings from the 18th green at Pebble Beach!
Dear reader, I would like to have written that this truly is the “happiest place on Earth” and everything I thought it would be. I was hesitant to post this, because my thoughts are so unnecessarily jaded such that it seems that I’m bitter with life itself, given that I literally wrote this with this view.
Originally, I wanted this post to finish the “retirement arc” from May 14 to, er,
now, as an example of how to “learn” activities where there isn’t a rigorous pathway forward (from chess, to trading, to golf/life.) Instead, I found myself standing at the 2nd hole tee box at Pebble waiting to hit and wondering what the fuck I was doing with myself. Allow me to explain:
Golf, fundamentally, is an elaborate way to kick rocks. (Indeed, I’m sure the origin story is something along the lines of Grug being bored in Scotland in the 1400s and hitting a rock with a stick.) This is further evidenced by the fact that a great golf course design loops — the 18th green ends up right by the clubhouse and the first tee, right back where you started. You take your hat off, laugh a bit at a rehearsed joke, shake some hands, and then go on your way.
When you don’t know you’re in the loop, you can enter “the zone”. I’m sure the reason why I initially got so great at chess, then at trading, is because I could ritually perform the same activity in an endlessly variable (yet contained) manner and apply incoming information to modify the efficacy that I threaded the loop with.
What spoils the loop is perspective. When you know that you’re playing a board game with no meaningful reward, it’s impossible to properly apply pressure to motivate yourself to find the best move in a position. When you know that you’ve reached the limit of noticing the number going up in your bank account — the studies stating that “increased salary does not bring happiness” are absolutely true, just look at where people predictably hop off the salary/self-improvement treadmill — mispricings stop looking like opportunies and instead look like crippling social idiocy that you can’t just go and fix yourself. It’s not quite the Daytona 500, where they are literally driving in circles, but I finally get the meaning of Twain’s quote about how golf is a good walk spoiled — what spoils the walk is the realization that you don’t have anything better to do, that you’re willing to fuel the money sink to pass the time by modifying the walk in a pointlessly complex manner. There are plenty of beaches with views that are free to traverse, after all.
After double bogeying hole 1, my caddy said that I’d enjoy the course more if I stopped keeping score and treated it like adult Disneyland. He was right on that note, but probably not about the crippling depression that came after I finished (cue Lenny Kravitz’s Fly Away.)
Something that I had an inkling of, but didn’t fully experience until now, is why those nonstop golfers are somewhat unhappy. “Retirement”, when done out of choice rather than necessity, is a state of existential purgatory. As I like to point out to others, people are so desperate for any semblance of purpose that they will greet people at Wal-Mart or draw a stripe on a Costco receipt for hours at a time.
Perhaps this is a bit of projection, but I don’t think I’m incorrect. The more I started listening to people around me, the worse my shots got, and the more it compounded the post-round clarity. (I don’t think most golfers’ yips, however, come with the side effect of drafting a blog post about Dostoevsky while trying to pure a 7-iron.) I thought back to the starter, who told my group that “the most important thing that matters to us here at Pebble Beach is that you leave with a smile on your face” before talking about pace of play. What kind of feel-good Hallmark bullshit is this? “Keep your arms inside the log ride”?
I virtually never lose my temper, and certainly would never be in risk of doing so over a round of golf. Nothing will ever make me as mad as losing chess games was when I lacked perspective. But what’s particularly frustrating is that I got to this point by being an expert in tracking and manipulating variable-reward skinner boxes while not getting caught in them myself. The variable reward in golf, of course, is hitting that shot in a terrible round that keeps you coming back until you hit “the zone” again. Some comparable loops that people find themselves in are doomscrolling, short-form TikToks (which, to my delight and chagrin, literally loop until you tell it otherwise), swiping on dating apps, dating in general (the amount of people that I talk to who have a “process” that leads to them being predictably single without ever asking the Chigurh question is beyond hilarious), purchasing watches (cue Rolex’s “offer”), and more. Even though I am certainly a consumer at my core, the Fight Club mantra of “the things you own end up owning you” still echoes in my head, as it’s precisely what allowed me to handle gargantuan amounts of risk in the first place, and not get trapped in the most evil loop of all — debt recursion (the idea that you can pay off a compounding debt that’s mathematically impossible to outscale is the most powerful hook on the planet, and is why usury was banned in religion.)
I don’t like seeing people trapped in loops — it’s very much a rage-driven response that I endlessly work them out and connect them, and then blast my thoughts on the public timeline, because I think we are fundamentally better creatures than this — or so I think when I’m motivated. What finally broke over the course of the round was the realization that Dostoevsky’s Underground Man was mostly a bitter, angry lunatic obsessed with this idea that the human mind is capable of breaking the loop. And as I watch round after round finish at the 18th green and can virtually see the cash register opening again and again — the Federal Reserve should take notes from Pebble Beach on how to print money — I’ve finally gained the perspective that the only reward for breaking one loop is getting caught in a larger one. The world is an infinite set of concentric, variable reward Skinner box circles, and each time the juice button pays out, you either become rife with existential dread or get addicted — despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage.
Anyway, playing Spyglass tomorrow, I’m sure the first hole-in-one is coming this time around!
Consciousness is nothing but narrative loops all the way down, and once you see that programming in action you get the the real challenge of life
Damn. This hits deep.
“What spoils the loop is perspective.”
This in particular.