Death of the Country Club
city-journal.org
city-journal.org
When my family immigrated to the US in the 1980s, my parents had limited English fluency and familiarity with the culture, so they couldn’t find any work. My father managed to work as a day laborer at country club one day. He had a conversation with one of the club members, expressed a desire to work in his broken English, was referred to another member, and then was connected with a permanent (menial) job at a local hotel. It made a big difference in our lives.
I don’t have any other experience with such clubs, but I’m thankful that at least one of them recognized and helped a hard worker get ahead.
Nobody has the time to do that anymore. That’s too rich for most political people and too time consuming for most business people.
Even then, that's a lot.
Maralago for example only has $14K in annual dues.
In the rare downtime we get these days, the pace of modern highly paid professions leaves us too exhausted for lengthy sports like golf.
Leisure is dead and will stay dead until life takes precedence in work-life-balance again.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/03/05/why-a...
I don't like golf, but I do like the idea of playing a relaxing yet challenging game outdoors which takes 4 hours to complete. Beats the shit out of fiddling with your phone.
The average person now has more free time than ever before, they just pack it full of stuff. Almost everyone could find much more free time if they dropped other activities like watching tv shows or social media.
Not only I could work as much as I want in Amazon and Microsoft, but at any time you could get an extra vacation.
It's a normal distribution around 4-8 hours. There's no correlation with hours worked to seniority.
Poll language here: https://strawpoll.com/47x15cf1
I specifically included meetings, etc, in the time counted.
If you took anecdotes from office workers IRL you'd think everyone was in the top quintile. You can argue that its an unrepresentative sample (people browsing HN) but I'd postulate that people not on HN are using downtime elsewhere.
We also belonged to a Ski club (again, not super expensive), and it was essentially our community. I think most of our family friends were part of that club or neighbouring one's.
Most of them were a little well off (think Dentist), but most were definitely not rich, though sure there were some.
Though clubs have been seen as the domain of the rich, they are really a great thing, I wish there were more of them.
The only real negative attribute I see is that they can be seen as a strong sign of class: people will be judged on what club they belong to, and the fees will determine status. It doesn't have to be that way however.
Younger generations are joining both.
The fact that the literature of the period employs the country club is not evidence of the country club's positive aspects -- it's frequently evidence of the exact opposite.
Societal forces, worth of underlying real estate, etc.
We need something similar, else we risk further erosion of social fabric.
Not sure that's better.
Anyway, the "high rent" bit makes me reject it wholesale. This was targeted at yuppies, not the people excluded from country clubs. Who gives a shit about yuppies (including us all): they can buy whatever they need.