Scuba Diving vs Golf
Comparing hobbies is subjective, but here are some reasons why many people (including myself) find taking up Scuba Diving a more compelling and life long rewarding experience than taking up Golf:
Warning
The information within this article is from personal experiences and a wide variety of research. If you are offended easily, woke or cannot take a bit of bashing humour, I’d advise you to close your browser, hug a teddy bear, and prepare for a long period of mandatory outrage.
The Underwater World vs The Golf Course 🐠
- Access to a New World: Scuba diving unlocks the other 71% of the planet. The underwater world offers exploration of coral reefs, kelp forests, underwater caves, shipwrecks, beautiful majestic animals and much much more.
- Golf is largely confined to manicured grasslands and humans in polo shirts.
- Wildlife Encounters: Diving provides opportunities for direct, intimate encounters with spectacular and diverse marine life (sharks, turtles, rays, whales, vibrant fish) in their natural habitat.
- Golf’s wildlife is generally limited to terrestrial animals like birds, squirrels, rabbits and the odd dead badger.
- A Sense of Exploration: Scuba diving taps into a deep human curiosity to explore, allowing you to feel like a true adventurer or pioneer.
- Golf, while requiring skill, is played on a well-mapped, structured course with not much left to the imagination.
Mental and Physical Benefits 🧘
- Mental Tranquility and Focus: Diving is often described as an act of meditation or “zen.” With a large focus being on your breathing, coupled with the tranquil sounds of the deep; under water you will think about nothing but the moment, this in itself provides a profound escape and stress relief from the dry world above.
- Golf can often be a source of frustration, annoyance, competitive pressure and boredom.
- Unique Physical Workout: Scuba diving is a low-impact, full-body workout that improves cardiovascular fitness, strength, and stamina as you move through a high-density medium.
- Golf, though relatively low-intensity, can be a demanding pursuit that rivals a Sunday morning trip to the hardware shop, primarily involving slow walking, a buggy ride for the slightest incline, and the repetitive club-swinging that only serves to get you to the end of the course so you can go home.
- Transferable Life Skills: Becoming a diver teaches crucial skills like equipment management and accountability, meticulous planning, problem-solving, buddy reliance, social interactions and enhancing situational awareness and self-sufficiency.
- Golf truly cultivates patience and resilience. For example, it teaches you to embrace a calmness while you meticulously excavate yourself from a sand bunker, practice advanced tracking skills searching for your ball deep within the woods, or learn the zen of perseverance as you brutally stomp a path through a thorny hedge.
Social and Travel Opportunities 🌎
- Globally Driven Travel: Scuba diving provides an immediate, purpose-driven excuse to travel to some of the world’s most beautiful and remote coastal destinations (the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, Red Sea, South Africa, Australia and the list goes on).
- Golf absolutely gives you the chance to travel, with thousands of scenic backdrops for your noble endeavor. Picture the breathtaking, awe-inspiring rush of finding yourself in an exciting new country, all for the singular, defining moment of your journey: the deeply spiritual experience of tapping that little ball into the ground.
- Vibrant, Shared Community: The diving community is inherently social, built around the buddy system and shared, awe-inspiring experiences both above and below the surface, leading to deep, international connections which last a lifetime.
- Golf is inherently social. It provides a unique setting to gather with friends, family, and work colleagues to collaboratively build up your daily step count while mostly talking about work, partake in sand clearance from your shoes, and then convene in the clubhouse for the essential debriefing on the collective trauma of that day’s ball loss over a pint.
- Environmental Stewardship: Divers frequently become passionate advocates for ocean conservation, actively participating in reef cleanups, citizen science, and protecting the environment they experience firsthand. Even the simple step of not eating sea food.
- Golf typically has a much lower environmental focus. Course building and maintenance involves a heroic campaign of disregard for the natural local inhabitants and their previously established ecosystem. To maintain this beautiful, water-intensive monoculture puts pressure on local resources, yet you needn’t worry about things like drought as golf courses are often statutorily exempt from hosepipe bans! Why? Because the noble pursuit of standing on a patch of impeccably watered, non-native turf, solely to shove a white ball into the ground with a stick, outweighs all other ecological concerns. It’s just science!!!
The Experiential Difference
- Consistent Novelty and Awe: Every dive is unique, you could dive the same site multiple times over, and find that each dive has its own story. With visibility, currents, weather, tide changes and the choice of night and day, you can see how just one site can seem like many. Not to mention you never know what magnificent creature will swim past. This sense of awe and wonder is a consistent, addictive feature.
- Golf’s main variation comes from the course layout or weather, but the objective remains the same (hitting a ball into a hole).
Conclusion
This article, of course, is purely a work of objective and completely unbiased journalism. While I am naturally (and correctly) biased toward scuba diving, the real point here is getting to the heart of the long-term value of a hobby.
Yes, the initial financial investment might favor golf slightly, unless of course, you count the mandatory cart purchase and the price of lost balls.
However, over time the long-term return on the initial investment into scuba diving can be measured by the sheer awe of experiencing that extra 71% of the world.
To embrace the adventure is to find your ticket to roaming freely, not just across borders, but into a deeper sense of self. It is where new friendships are forged in shared moments of awe, where memories are imprinted with the vivid, epic colours of a world unseen, and where you discover pure tranquility and momentary awareness that silences all noise.
I could go on, but it’s clear the scales tip completely toward scuba diving with its unique social structure, mind-blowing experiences, and moments that are genuinely life-changing and eternally rewarding.
Ready to start diving? Give us a call at 07522 493132
Or email us at info@divexplore.co.uk
