Golf: A Complete Waste of Time and Money That is Destroying the Planet
As someone who writes exclusively about personal finance & economics, I am very careful about how I choose my words. I don’t want to sound like I have all the answers because I don’t. I find myself constantly hedging and at times holding back when I have a particularly strong opinion about a subject.
Not today.
Today, I’m giving my unfiltered feelings about why I hate golf and wish it would go away.
Put simply, Golf is a waste of time, money and environmental resources. The world would be a better place if golf did not exist.
Golf is a Waste of Time
Let’s start with the least offensive thing about golf which is that it is a massive waste of time. The conventional wisdom is that it takes about 4 hours to play 18-holes of golf. Having suffered through many rounds at golf at bachelor parties, I can confirm this is a fair estimate.
Globally, there were 456 million rounds of golf played in 2017. that works out to an average of 19 rounds per golfer.
Remembering that the average round of golf takes 4 hours we can safely assume that 1.824 billion hours or 76 million days are wasted playing golf every year. The average golfer wastes around 76 hours or 3.2 days playing golf every year. For golf enthusiasts that number will be much higher.
This does not count the time spent in the clubhouse, driving ranges, practice lessons and time spent watching golf on TV.
As an aside is there anything more boring in the world than watching golf on TV?
Golf is a Waste of Money
I won’t even get into the opportunity cost of the richest and most successful people on the planet spending 1.8 billion hours per year hitting a ball with a stick. I’ll leave it to you to imagine more productive ways that time could be spent.
Golf is expensive.
Golf WRX published an informative article about how much money a serious golfer spends each year.
There are a lot of things golfers spend money on.
- Clubs
- Balls
- Gloves
- Tees
- Green fees and club memberships
- (ugly) Golf clothes and apparel
- Tournaments
- Lessons
- Training Aids
- Golf magazines
The list goes on. All in they estimate that a serious golfer spends $13,444 per year playing golf. To put that in perspective, the median income in the U.S was $31,786 in 2017.
Golf is Bad for the Environment
Let’s start with a few basic facts.
- The average golf course requires around 150 acres of land.
- There are 34,011 golf courses in the world (almost half of which are in the U.S)
- A typical golf course uses 90 million gallons of water every year
Golf courses account for more than 5.1 million acres of land worldwide. That land that could be used as wooded areas, farmland, animal habits, wetlands and countless other activities that are far more useful to society than golf.
Golf courses use 13 trillion gallons of water every year. That is such a large number it’s difficult to wrap your head around. To put that in perspective, that’s enough to fill more than 4.6 million Olympic size swimming pools.
In California, there are 866 golf courses. Assuming average water use, these golf courses use an estimated 78 billion gallons of water. That is particularly notable as California has been struggling with drought issues for years.
I may be biased, but I look at golf as an incredible waste of resources and for that reason, I believe we would be better off without it.
