Life & Wisdom Quote by Richard Reeves

“An intellectual is someone who avoids the mundane by lowering his handicap” is a neat little grenade disguised as a definition. Reeves takes the supposedly lofty category of “intellectual” and yanks it onto a golf course, where status is quantified, gamified, and quietly obsessive. A handicap exists to make play “fair,” but lowering it is about distinction: proof you’re not just participating, you’re improving. In Reeves’s formulation, the intellectual’s escape from everyday life isn’t brave or selfless; it’s competitive self-fashioning.

The joke works because it’s double-edged. On one level, it punctures the romance of the thinker as a person above ordinary concerns. Instead, the intellectual is another striver, optimizing a scorecard. On another level, it admits something sympathetic: the mundane can be suffocating, and people reach for systems that turn boredom into measurable progress. The problem is that the measurement becomes the point. “Avoids the mundane” sounds like a noble refusal of banality; “lowering his handicap” reveals it as a hobbyhorse of self-regard.

Contextually, it lands in a late-20th-century skepticism about credentialed expertise and cultural gatekeeping. Reeves, as a writer, is attuned to how intellectual life can become a performance of difficulty: reading as par, conversation as stroke play, taste as a private club. The line’s sting is that it doesn’t accuse intellectuals of thinking too much; it accuses them of keeping score while pretending they’re above the game.