There was a time, back when the world was merely cruel rather than outright psychotic, when the local banker was a man of leisure. He was a creature of pinstripes and gin, a man whose primary contribution to the gross domestic product was a firm handshake and a 3:00 PM tee time. This was the era of 'relationship banking,' a euphemism for a system where loans were granted based on the quality of one’s pedigree and the ability to avoid hitting a slice into the water hazard on the ninth hole. But as the recent post-mortems of the industry suggest, the 'retreat' from the golf course isn't an act of newfound moral clarity; it is the final, pathetic gasp of a class of people who have realized they are being replaced by the very algorithms they commissioned to enslave the rest of us.

The retreat from leisure is being framed by some as a tightening of belts, a response to a world of transparency and regulatory oversight. What a charmingly naive fantasy. The Left looks at the empty fairways and sees a win for 'accountability,' as if a banker sitting in a dark room staring at a Bloomberg terminal is somehow less predatory than one standing in a sand trap. They imagine that if the masters of the universe are miserable, the proletariat must be winning. It is the classic progressive delusion: the belief that suffering is a finite resource, and if we distribute enough of it to the wealthy, there will be less of it for the poor. In reality, the banker is just more efficient now. He doesn’t need to buy you a steak to ruin your life; he can do it via a high-frequency trading script while eating a sad, lukewarm desk-salad.

Meanwhile, the Right wails about the loss of 'tradition' and the 'personal touch' that once defined the financial sector. They miss the days when banking was a 'gentleman’s profession,' conveniently forgetting that 'gentleman' was simply code for 'someone whose father owned a plantation or a railroad.' They lament the death of the country club deal, as if the lack of a polo shirt makes the subprime mortgage crisis any less of a systemic lobotomy. They want the old crooks back because the old crooks looked like them and shared their taste in Scotch. They cannot fathom a world where the extraction of wealth is no longer a social event but a cold, sterile, automated process. They are mourning a corpse that was already rotting in 1929.

The deeper reason for this retreat is far more nihilistic than the industry would care to admit. Banking has been 'commoditized.' The 'value-add' of a human being in a suit has plummeted to zero. In the old days, the banker was a gatekeeper, a shaman who translated the mysteries of capital for the unwashed masses. Today, capital is a flood, and the banker is just another piece of debris floating in the current. He no longer plays golf at 3:00 PM because he is terrified. He is scared of the data, scared of the compliance officers who treat every lunch like a potential crime scene, and most of all, he is scared of the realization that his entire career is a vestigial organ in the body of global finance.

We are witnessing the industrialization of the heist. The 'retreat' from the golf course is simply the transition from the artisanal, hand-crafted fraud of the 20th century to the mass-produced, automated exploitation of the 21st. The old-school banker was a predator, yes, but at least he had the decency to be lazy. He understood that the point of having money was to not work. The modern banker has fallen into the trap of the 'hustle culture,' a pathetic state of being where one works twenty hours a day to facilitate the movement of money they will never have the time to spend. It is a feedback loop of misery. They have traded the green grass of the fairway for the blue light of the monitor, and they call it 'progress.'

There is no nobility in this shift. There is no 'reform' here. There is only the grim reality that the people in charge of the world's wealth are now just as miserable, frantic, and replaceable as the people they are foreclosing on. The golf course was the last vestige of a ruling class that at least had the dignity to enjoy their ill-gotten gains. Now, we are governed by a class of algorithm-adjacent parasites who are too stressed to swing a club. It is the ultimate irony: the bankers have finally succeeded in making the world a joyless, hyper-efficient machine, and they have accidentally trapped themselves inside the gears. Don’t weep for the empty golf courses. Weep for the fact that the people who ruined the economy are now too busy to even take a nap.