#generalism

[nonetheless]

47 thoughts on the glory of looking-- and living-- beyond a specialty: "In praise of generalism" @thebeliever.net

(Plus- Pierre de Fermat)

Widening our irises: https://roughlydaily.com/2025/08/17/if-i-am-to-be-remembered-i-hope-it-will-not-be-primarily-for-my-specialized-scientific-work-but-as-a-generalist-one-to-whom-enlarging-terences-words-nothing-human-and-nothing-in-external-natu/

[dcseis2025]

[adrianabarbaraaaaa]

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[adrianabarbaraaaaa]

[kris-and-the-pnictogens]

Studying Generalism

It's taken us altogether too long to realize that if we had a proper place or station in life, a profession or occupation, it's to be a generalist. Every time we thought that we'd found a career in the usual specific sense that's assumed by U.S. society, we got bounced out of it. As you might imagine that wasn't pleasant to experience. It's meant decades of frustration and anger and self-loathing, racking up a string of failed careers. But even a failed career means experience and it has been of great long-term advantage to us, it seems, to have acquired such a wide variety of experiences, even if they were short and shambolic ones.

But how does one become a generalist? Pursuing a specific career is far more straightforward and well-documented, but there's no discipline or body of wisdom corresponding to generalism, is there? Actually...there is, but the difficulty is that almost all of it is likely to be bogus. For there's one sort of human being most likely to assert that they're generalists, and that's the man of business, the "entrepreneur" or the "founder" or the "investor". Because they're merely interested in success in the conventional capitalist sense, the would-be "founders" of the world are aimless and capricious in their interests, but they're easily persuaded to think that this means they're universal geniuses, good at everything they dabble with. Thus I don't doubt that if I looked for books purporting to describe how to be a generalist, I'd find thousands—and they'd all be terrible.

If there's any truly helpful and salutary approach to generalism, I suspect, it's through spirituality and mysticism. I have encountered the idea that magic or "the occult" can be regarded as the art of arts, the human discipline that really and truly does touch upon everything else. I'm reminded of my one taste of the work of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, the famous polymath of the German Renaissance, and was struck to learn that it was very much like an outline of all known human knowledge. If you were a polymath in those days, like Agrippa or Avicebron or Paracelsus, very likely you gained a reputation as an occultist and practitioner of magic. The "Enlightenment" and the severities of the Christian Reformation and Counter-Reformation rather put an end to such notions, and studying the occult became very disreputable and unsafe. But I would like to reverse that trend! =D

We are having a very difficult time figuring out how to get started. It has been an uphill battle of years simply to impose even the most basic of disciplines upon ourselves and internalize them. To put it bluntly, authoritarian U.S. society does everything possible to prevent the establishment of personal disciplines: we're supposed to jump around when we're told and that means we're discouraged as much as possible from having any strongly developed personality or sense of values. Frauds and charlatans have captured this field, each selling their own canned (and poisonous) variation on how to have an identity or purpose, always pitched in commercial terms: this is how to be successful, how to make friends and influence people, and so forth. Another difficulty is that we were never properly taught how to study! U.S. schools give this practically no attention. It's a sink-or-swim thing: the child is expected to figure out how to study on their own. Hence we learned nothing but bad habits and terrible coping mechanisms for our various cognitive and neurological issues...we never learned how to do it correctly.

It really does feel like...Back to Zero, if I may say so (q.v. Fate/Zero.)

~Chara of Pnictogen

[jarrettfuller]

At the end of February, I was called out as generalist on Twitter. The accusation—it could only be that—made my face flush. As soon as the notification hit my phone, I searched the thread’s backlog for the initial question that had prompted some designer, a complete stranger, to implicate me. It

I really enjoyed this short essay from Chloe Scheffe on being a design generalist:

Generalism, I now realize, is in my nature. I’m a generalist not because I think I’m good at everything, but because I think I’m very good at nothing. For now I’m unsatisfied by all that I make (dissatisfaction is inherent to my particular strain of generalism; it is its primary torture). I ask myself, constantly, forever and ever, What is the thing I love to do most? and What am I best at? and What am I? I respond by working in every arena I possibly can. I investigate. How can I know if I do not attempt?

All the power of generalism—and it does have power—is in what its everything-ness implies. That is: To be a persistent generalist is actually to be deeply, relentlessly ambitious. It is the natural byproduct of curiosity, of engagement, of unwavering standards, of the insatiable desire for excellence. Commitment to generalism belies a keen and willing mind. Generalism is a pursuit of self. It’s how we strive. Driving us is the hope-borne belief that we will eventually design ourselves into the thing we will be.

This, obviously, resonated with me. While I'm not sure my undergraduate education ever explicitedly pushed specificity over generalism, there was a sense that generalists were harder to pitch. I've always tried to pitch myself as a generalist, both because as Chloe writes, I've never felt I was especially great at anything, but also out of a fear of boxing myself in — into a specific way of working, a certain style, a particular vertical. I crave that flexibly. This has become increasingly hard as I've sought to brand my studio, again resisting the urge to define a specific area but realizing how it'd make branding my work much, much easier.

I'm reminded of this idea of the 'art monster', which I talked about in my recent interview with Peter Mendeslund. Coined by Jenny Offill, in her book, Dept. of Speculation, the art monster just has an innate desire to create something that wasn't there before, unconstrained by medium or discpline or genre. Increasingly, I've found this definition to be the ultimate goal.