The clubhouse at The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts. Getty Images
The drinks arrive by drone now. At Apogee, the three-course golf cathedral that rose out of the Hobe Sound scrub in Florida, a small aircraft can ferry a cold one to the 14th green so no one has to interrupt the round. The founding members reportedly paid over $1 million each for the privilege. They are, by and large, between 35 and 55, with kids in school and a club membership or two back in the city, and they make up the most amusing reversal in American leisure: the people who spent the 2010s declaring the country club extinct have decided they want one, only with better food and a padel court. To understand why that’s funny, you have to remember what a country club was built to be. The American version arrived in the 1880s—the Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts, usually gets the credit—and it spread with the suburbs and the commuter rail as a place where a certain kind of family could golf, dine, marry off its children and, crucially, decide who else got to do those things alongside them. The amenities were the visible product, but the relentless screening was the actual one.
Then, for a while, it looked finished. Golf shed courses for most of two decades—net closures every year from the mid-2000s onward, nearly 280 in 2019 alone—and the obituaries effectively wrote themselves. Institutional belonging had gone out of fashion generally; this was the era the sociologist Robert Putnam diagnosed in Bowling Alone, when Americans quit the Elks and the bowling leagues and the Tuesday-night anything. Church membership slipped below half the population for the first time in 2020, by Gallup’s count. The country club, with its dress codes and its committees, read as a relic of a joining culture that no longer existed. The future, we were told, belonged to Soho House, to Zero Bond, to the city club with no sign on the building. Then, in a surprising twist, golf came back—and not gently. Participation jumped 41 percent between 2019 and 2025, and the number of golfers at private clubs climbed about 25 percent to 1.9 million, 60 percent of them under 50. Waitlists hit records. At the high end—clubs charging $90,000 or more to walk in the door—71 percent now make you wait. The median initiation fee went from $29,000 to $50,000 in three years. The institution everyone buried is now the institution no one can get into.
Yet what changed is not the country club. What changed is us. The sociologist Ray Oldenburg spent the late 1980s arguing that a healthy life needs a “third place”—not home, not work, but a free and leveling spot where you bump into people, the café and the tavern and the barbershop. Those places have been closing for years, and the Covid pandemic finished a lot of them off. Into that vacuum arrived a loneliness that the Surgeon General felt moved to declare a public health emergency in 2023, comparing the toll of social disconnection to smoking. Americans now spend more time alone than at any point since researchers started measuring in the 1960s; in-person socializing fell more than 20 percent between 2003 and 2023, and among young men, the drop was steeper still. We engineered ourselves into solitude, and then we went looking for company we could schedule.
The Bridge. Madison Fender/BFA.com
The country club, it turns out, was sitting right there—a third place with a gate. So were its city cousins, and the line between them has all but dissolved. Soho House, fresh off a $2.7 billion deal to take itself private, is building the countryside it once defined itself against: Soho Farmhouse in Oxfordshire added padel courts, a family pool and a longevity lab dispensing IV drips and a 250-acre version cleared its planning board in February for a former farm upstate. The legacy clubs, meanwhile, read the same memo and started spending. The banquet-hall chicken is gone, replaced by chefs poached from Michelin kitchens. All that chintz got hauled to the curb, and the clubhouses now aim to look like a contemporary art museum, which at The Bridge in Bridgehampton means an actual Andy Warhol of Jack Nicklaus on the wall and a membership rumored near $950,000, capped at 180. The golf became optional. The pools, the spas, the coworking nooks and the kids’ camps were what kept families enrolled, and a club that signs up the children keeps the parents.
Here is where it gets harder to feel good about. The hunger is real—the data on how alone we’ve become is not in dispute, and the wish to sit in a room full of faces is the most human thing there is. But the country club satisfies that wish using the exact mechanism it was built on, the one Max Weber named more than a century ago: social closure, the monopolizing of a good by shutting out everyone defined as ineligible. The initiation fee is doing what Thorstein Veblen said conspicuous waste always does, signaling worth through a number that serves no function but to be large. And the whole apparatus reproduces itself the way Pierre Bourdieu described, the children of members absorbing the tastes and the access that will one day read as their own merit.
We are buying belonging with the same currency that always bought it. We have simply gotten more comfortable saying so out loud. The economist Allison Schrager, writing in Bloomberg last summer, articulated the shift as acute: today’s clubs “commodify elitism rather than enforce it,” because getting in no longer depends on pedigree, only on getting your name on the list and paying. That sounds like progress until you really sit with it. The sociologist Eric Klinenberg has spent years warning that when the affluent opt out of shared public space and into private versions, the result is “two different societies.” Putnam had a cleaner word for the cost: clubs are superb at building the kind of social capital that bonds people to others like themselves, and useless at the kind that bridges them to anyone else. The bonding is the pleasure, but the missing bridge is the bill, and the whole country ends up paying it.
The B. Draddy retail experience at Sweetens Cove. B. Draddy
Not everyone is buying the wall, to be fair, and the counter-current is worth watching. A few hours northwest of Atlanta sits Sweetens Cove, a nine-hole walk-up in rural Tennessee with no clubhouse to speak of, no membership and no initiation fee, that has nonetheless become one of the most worshipped names in the game. “Golfers are looking for experiences that feel honest,” Jack Lessing, president of the menswear label B. Draddy, which planted a permanent camp there via a retail partnership, told Observer—a course that “built something real” and “created a golf destination category of its own.” It’s the same generation chasing the opposite thing: the un-velvet rope, the cachet of a place that lets anyone walk on. Exclusivity sells. So, allegedly, does its absence—though the money is still flowing toward the rope. And the country club’s own past keeps the present honest. In 1962, a survey of 803 clubs found 416 that admitted no Jews; it took the 1990 Shoal Creek scandal to drag golf toward integration, and Tom Watson resigned from his own Kansas City club that year over its refusal to admit a Jewish man. The diversity numbers are climbing now—women have driven the majority of new golfers since 2020, and minority participation has surged—and that progress is real and worth applauding. It also sits on a foundation laid to keep people out, worth remembering every time someone calls a $650,000 initiation fee a community.
That word does a lot of lifting, and it usually means wall. Apogee is a community. Zero Bond, with its phantom waitlist of thousands, is a community. We may, as one member put it cheerfully, be entering a new gilded age—and the gilded always did prefer the gentle nouns. We got lonely, all of us, in a country that kept closing the places where strangers used to meet. The people who could afford it bought the feeling back, behind a gate, and called it the future. The rest of us are still outside, looking for somewhere that doesn’t check a list at the door.
