Lebron James is obsessed with golf. His new YouTube channel is what is getting the most attention, but this has been a publicly known fact for a while. There’s even a (largely unevidenced) theory that he chose to play his potentially final season in Philadelphia for it’s proximity to elite golf courses.
I just want to take this time to deconstruct why Lebron’s golf obsession is interesting. It’s a reminder that first derivatives often matter more than both absolute values and higher order derivatives. Let me explain.
Lebron at 41 years of age, in the face of history, experience, and logic, is still one of the 20 very best human beings at basketball in the world. So, in terms of absolutes, playing basketball should still give him immense satistfaction. The problem, of course, is his personal reference point (how good he used to be) and the rate of decay he is experiencing from that reference point. This is a person who spent more than two decades getting better and better at something, who arrived at a point where they were literally the very best in the world at it, only to then at some point in time arrive at the awareness that they were in fact getting worse at it. To be clear, that rate of decay is far slower than anyone could have predicted, but it remains decay nonetheless. And it’s not just “getting worse”. It’s getting worse at something that you are orienting your every day around. Your meals, your sleep, your family life, everything, all in dedication to something you are getting worse at.
I’m now going to generalize from my own lived experience, but I think the emotional returns to dedication are always stronger when the first derivative is positive, but no amount of work can guarantee it. You can work harder and increase the positive gains or, failing that, slow down the decay, but at some point the decay is inevitable (i.e. the work shows up in the second derivative). And no matter how much you slow it down, decay just isn’t as satisfying as the day-to-day lived experience as improvement or even plateauing.
And this is where golf comes in. Golf is a sport that has much lower athletic barriers to entry and, for Lebron or anyone who is starting out, a vastly lower reference point for quality. It is entirely likely that every time Lebron has ever picked up a golf club he is better at golf than he was the previous month. It is the 100% inverse to what Lebron has experienced playing basketball for at least 7 or 8 years now, likely longer. The relief he must feel, directly experiencing and observing the returns to his efforts.
Coming to terms with being past your prime is a standard trope in narrative fiction of all formats, but from an actual mental health point of view, I don’t think it is given enough attention, particularly for those at the tops of their field. There are vanishingly few purely natural elites in any profession, vocation, or craft. Most have had to sacrfice whole avenues of life experiences to achieve such levels, and when they do begin to decay they either have to endure public scrutiny bordering on censure, or the quiet tragedy of being alone in their ability to discern just how much they have lost. The latter is almost worse. Almost.
As a final tidbit, let me make a loose connection to technological innovation and AI specifically. Obsolescence hurts. A negative first derivative hurts. But what hurts even more is an unexpected shock that accelerates that decay. Injuries are mentally hard for athletes, in part, because of their often discontinuous nature. They were still improving, the rate at which they were improving was accelerating, until they weren’t. There are professions that are wrestling with this right now. There are professionals who reasonably expected to have another half decade before the decay began. That timeline is now in question. And most of us don’t have the luxury of being a generationally great athlete who can immediately become great at something completely new.
Economist Writing Every Day 