Disruption versus Sustainability (golf and relationships, in that order)
The Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund (the Saudi government) created a new golf tour to compete with the PGA and European tours. It's called the "LIV" tour.It has money. An incredible amount of money.
What it doesn't have is a TV deal, or a deep field of players (although they did throw 100+ million to get Dustin Johnson and Phil Mickelson (America's Greatest Phony) to play.
Here's what Mickelson said when discussing this tour:
“They’re scary motherfuckers to get involved with,” he said. “We know they killed [Washington Post reporter Jamal] Khashoggi and have a horrible record on human rights. They execute people over there for being gay. Knowing all of this, why would I even consider it? Because this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape how the PGA Tour operates.”
If it's hard for you to read to the end of that quote with your mouth closed, you're not alone. But this post is not titled "Phil Mickelson is a Complete Asshole." I can look forward to writing that post another day.
Instead, I want to talk about disruption versus sustainability.
What the news media loves to cover these days is disruption, because it gets them clicks. That's why news coverage has tilted to the sensational and bizarre over the last twenty years.
I think it's possible that it's made all of us love disruption more than we used to.
That's all the LIV tour represents: disruption. There's almost zero chance it ever amounts to anything, no matter how much money gets thrown at it, because money alone isn't enough to create a new ecosystem. It's enough to make a splash, but that's all.
It's belly diving, not swimming.
For some reason, I thought about this in terms of relationships. I don't want to get binary, but in the simplest sense, people want one of two things in a relationship: disruption or sustainability. Affairs are disruptions, and they're highly appealing to people who are unhappy in their marriages. There's a good reason most don't survive after a marriage ends, though: they weren't designed to.
Disruption is exciting. Intoxicating, even, as I slip back into my 1930s diction.
I'm guessing that unhappy people look for disruptive relationships, because they want something other than their regular lives, which are difficult for them.
Happy people, on the other hand, aren't looking for disruption. Why would they disrupt their lives, which are already a good thing? These people look for something sustainable to enhance their existing lives, not disrupt or replace them.
In relationships (of all kinds), it's important to understand which kind of person you're dealing with.
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