Every day, we encounter whole fields of study or activity to which we say, “That’s not my thing,” “I’m just not interested in that.” Everyone does this; generalists simply do it less than others. But I believe there are some things that pretty much everybody should dabble in: fields where everybody should have, say, roughly two university courses’ worth of knowledge. So we’re all “necessary generalists,” in the sense that we need to have these few things covered, even if we’d rather put all our focus into a single separate thing.
I’m going to try very hard not to be too subjective about this. I’m going to try to avoid the trap of, “I really value doing X, therefore everyone should be doing X.” Because that gets us nowhere; everybody has their own world-saving plan like, “If everyone just read the classics,” “If everyone practiced mindfulness,” “If everyone learned how the economy works,” etc. But I really am going to try to be as objective as possible, and you can be the judge of how well I do.
Necessary competencies:
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Physical health – First attempt at objectivity: Everyone has a physical human body. You should know your body very well; it’s the only one you’ve got. It’s what you are. There are several reasons why medical/health specialists can’t give you everything you need, especially in a world with more health choices (and hazards) than have ever existed before.
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Financial planning – Second attempt at objectivity: (Almost) Everybody wants more money in the future than they have today, or they want some amount of money in the future without always working for a paycheck. And in a relatively free-market financial system, the way you grow your wealth is by risking it. So we find ourselves in a weird state of affairs where everybody needs to win at this wild casino game just to be able to support themselves in old age.
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Philosophy – Third attempt at objectivity: Everybody has a mind, minds are affected by ideas in somewhat predictable ways, and sometimes the effects are harmful. Ideas are infectious. You need to know enough to be able to reject bad ideas and bad philosophy. Like the state of physical health, there are more hazards of this nature in the modern world than in the kinds of small provincial worlds we evolved for.
Why can’t I outsource these things?
“Really, why can’t we just pay specialists to handle these things for us, like we do for most everything else?” I’ll go into that question in more detail in each of the individual posts above, but I’ll give a broad answer here. It’s that these things are all highly personal: everybody’s solution will look different.
That hasn’t always been the case, which is why it feels weird and arbitrary that you’d have to gain competence in these specific areas. In a more closed-off traditional culture, the kind you evolved to thrive in, your physical health and material wellbeing and inner worldview would all be managed adequately by your culture. There’d be a straightforward life-path to follow, and it would work well enough to keep you from danger. And, no one in your community would know any better. Today we live in the chaotic conglomeration of hundreds of traditional cultures. No single one is well adapted for the modern world, so we have to move forward tentatively, each of us choosing from a much wider array of values and behaviors.
Another way of saying all that is: We’re now extremely individualized, or “atomized” as some say, and that means each individual now bears some responsibilities, fully, which in past generations were shared and borne in part.