False Generalists

Some people are generalists (and they should read this blog). Some people are specialists, and that’s perfectly fine. But nobody should be a False Generalist.

The opposite of a True Generalist is a “by-default” generalist: a person who floats around between many interests, not out of a genuine joy of engagement, but out of something negative—maybe a compulsive need to escape focused work, maybe a fear of failing at their main pursuit (or even having a main pursuit to fail at).
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Or, maybe their constant task-switching is a symptom of ADD. Or maybe they burned out their dopamine receptors watching TikTok. Maybe they just want to appear unique, so they fake interest in some unconventional activity to add a bit of color to their persona. Maybe they’re in school, and they just feel immense pressure to be the well-rounded, straight-A’s-in-everything-plus-extracurriculars student.

Any of these things can plague specialists and make them act like generalists. And that’s unfortunate. It’s an imbalance that ideally should be fixed.

But these things can also plague True Generalists! Generalists can lose focus, or be afraid of failure, or have ADD, or be posers. So we wonder, “Am I living like a generalist because it’s in my nature, or am I doing it in reaction to something negative?” Are you a True Generalist, deep down?

Self diagnosis

It can be really hard to tell the difference between “my true self” and “these personal problems that I need to fix.” Actually, there is no clear distinction at all. The ultimate standard for “mental health” is still “Can you function well in society?” But-

First, one can easily raise the objection, “What if society is wrong, as it has often been in the past?” and well, that’s a whole philosophical rabbit hole (and a theme of lots of great art including one of the greatest albums of all time). But even setting that aside, assuming society is fine right now…

One can also ask, “How ‘well’ is ‘functioning well’?” and that question is more relevant here. A would-be specialist could be living as a false generalist and be “functioning well,” making ends meet, maintaining relationships, and so on. And maybe, with their current set of neuroses, they’d actually fail at going all-in as a specialist. So now, we’re not talking about “curing their mental health to fix their life” so much as “rearranging some parts of their personality, risking the satisfactory life they have for a potentially better one.”

This is neurosis in a nutshell: the miscarriage of clumsy lies about reality. But we can also see at once that there is no line between normal and neurotic, as we all lie and are all bound in some ways by the lies… We call a man “neurotic” when his lie begins to show damaging effects on him or on people around him… Otherwise, we call the refusal of reality “normal” because it doesn’t occasion any visible problems.
Ernest Becker, Denial of Death

You have a “fear of failure,” for example? By definition, that is part of who you are. It’s serving (or attempting to serve) some positive function in your life, in response to past experiences (say, a particularly harsh failure that damaged your self-image or made you feel endangered in some way). You, with your fear of failure, are in equilibrium. And you haven’t encountered any failures that destroyed your body or your mind, so it’s working. If you got rid of that fear, you’d be a different person—a new equilibrium, one that hasn’t yet stood the test of time. A risk! What if your current level of fear is appropriate, and without it you’d throw yourself into something foolish? What if your fear of failure was holding back manic delusions of grandeur?

This sucks, what the heck

“This post started as ‘find out if you’re a True Generalist or just a specialist with some issues,’ and now it’s like ‘you definitely have issues and you can’t get rid of them.'”

I don’t mean to say that you should just remain in whatever state you’re in. You are predisposed to specialism or generalism—or somewhere on that spectrum. Another way of saying that is just, “There are things you’d naturally be passionate about—maybe one particular thing or maybe a handful of different things.” If you’re not currently living in a way that matches your predisposition, it’s probably worth it to (carefully) shake things up, change some parts of who you are, and reach for that alternative life.

“But if my predisposition might not match my actions, then how do I figure out what my predisposition is?”

Evaluations

It’s an imprecise science, but modern psychology gives us some tools for questions like this.

• We can use hypothetical questions that take away all the needs and dangers and obligations of life to reveal what the mind desires most. “What would you do if you knew you could not fail?” Would you go all-in on one thing, or would you find success in many different things? Maybe you’d tie together two separate projects into something brand new. Bear in mind, once you answer the question, “What would you do if you knew you could not fail?” the next step is not to go do it. There’s a reason you haven’t done it yet. Remember, you’re at equilibrium. So the next step is to figure out what that reason is and how you can overcome it, and what the risk will be.

• We can listen to our unconscious minds. Is there some imaginary future that you often catch yourself daydreaming about? Is there a scenario you often regular-dream about? These are worth examining. Your unconscious mind is still you, and it sometimes expresses desires that “you” might have forgotten.

• We can test for positive or negative motivation. Are you doing things in pursuit of something good or in retreat from something bad? Ask, “Why am I doing this right now?” and then, “Would I give up this action if I could also remove the source of motivation?” In college, when I was supposed to be studying and was getting stressed out, I would watch street fight videos on the internet. This was long before I started kickboxing or even had any desire to start. So this was not a case of generalist-style free-exploration into a new hobby or skill. It was just some cathartic entertainment to escape from stress. “Would I give up this action if I could also remove the source of motivation?” In college, YES, I would’ve been happy to give up watching fight videos if the stress of studying also went away. Nowadays, I sometimes watch fight videos to get more familiar with the sport that I’m learning, and NO I would not remove those videos from my life if I also had to remove my desire to learn kickboxing. It’s the same behavior, but with positive and negative motivations. You can imagine how negative motivations can cause a would-be specialist to flee to other activities, and how a life with more positive motivations would let a person to do more of the work they’re really predisposed to do.

Is this all necessary?

Hey, probably not. You probably know whether you’re a generalist or a specialist, from just a bit of introspection. But if you have a lot of bad habits, they may twist and complicate your view of what kind of life you truly want. If that’s the case, use this post as a prompt to think more creatively about that question and consider what alternative lives you might want to make the jump to.