Specialisation Is For Insects, Not Humans
Learn as much as you can, our common joy depends upon it
In 2003, at a random party in a random house, I found an extraordinary book upon the bookshelf, and my world fell apart. I was in my early twenties, and had been on the edge of depression since high school. The world looked drab and despairing, brown and ordinary. The feedback I received from the world was that life would be this way forever, there was no magic, and nothing extraordinary except for those moments I could escape under the influence of drugs or the spell of a woman. Against all odds and all evidence, I hoped that the world was in fact interesting, wondrous and exciting, and that joy could someday be found.
The book was Prometheus Rising, by Robert Anton Wilson. I read it like a hungry man who has found a secret cache. Page after page fed me and filled me up, giving me hope that there were in fact, people who got it, people who were not satisfied to live as if working, fucking and feeding were the only things on the agenda. The book was full of experiments designed to change my mind, and they did, literally. My brain, mind, and eventually body began to change, and I became lighter, stronger, happier, and more joyful. My entire future was decided at that random party in that random house.
There were many things in that book that helped me, but one that I remember to this day is “specialisation is for insects”:
"Specialisation is for insects," the science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein wrote. "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly."
For me, two powerful concepts emerged from this quote. The first was optionality. By trying to become an apprentice in a subject, whether it was baking, rock-climbing, psychology or electrical work, I gave myself another option in life, yet another thing I could do if I needed. Nicholas Nassim Taleb, in his excellent Incerto series, regards optionality as the supreme goal. Increasing our options is always a good thing. Not in such a way that choice overload and analysis paralysis become a problem, but so that in an uncertain future one does not get backed into a corner. Good decisions always keeps options open for as long as possible. For example, getting an expensive mortgage is an exercise in option reduction across multiple domains beyond just the financial. One’s emotional options become reduced to stress, frustration, despair and anger, entertainment options are Netflix on the couch, again, and one’s skill development becomes suffocated as all one’s time goes to working to pay the bills.
The above example discusses options in one's life, but my overarching philosophy is that a person can and should endeavor to encompass and expand all options within one’s being. Being a man does not preclude me from acting like a woman. Being in my forties does not preclude me from behaving as a child or an old man. Being a tradesman does not preclude me from acting as a philosopher or an artist or a hippie or a redneck. Behaving as a virtuous man does not preclude me from acting violently, or stupidly, or precociously, or manipulatively. All options are open to me. Some options I may never use, but those doors are not closed. My usual demeanor is that of a calm and affable man, but if I am put into a situation where I must defend my family, I want the option for extreme, decisive violence available to me. I can simply make a decision to exercise that option or not.
Physical and mental are easy to understand, but the vast lands of socialisation and emotion also contain a myriad of options to learn. Many of us specialise in feeling certain emotions, most commonly anger, happiness, frustration and boredom. I applied optionality to feelings, under the assumption that the more I understood and experienced the wide array of feelings and emotions available to me as a human, the more options I would have in any situation. And this has proven to be an enormous blessing. In times of difficulty, I have felt tough feelings and been ok, instead of trying to escape or change what I feel. And conversely, when things are good, I have the power to truly experience joy without feeling embarrassed about it.
The second concept I learnt was connective intelligence. Connective intelligence is a grand way of saying that the more I know, the more I can know. If I learn a skill, it is not just the explicit skill that I learn. The cortical and physiological effects of that learning extend into everything else that I know and do. All other skills and knowledge that I have is affected by the new learning, some strongly, some almost imperceptibly. And the meta effects of learning makes learning itself easier. Thus, every new skill becomes easier to learn, because learning across all domains shares similarities.
The heart of intelligence is the ability to discover relationships. Intelligence is being able to connect two previously uncorrelated nodes, and the more nodes you can correlate to, the more likely you are to find a solution. Learning skills increases the connection nodes, and it doesn’t matter if those skills are cutting wood, vacuuming the carpet, cooking a meatloaf, selling, writing comedy, playing an instrument, navigating in the bush, hairdressing, discovering compassion; your brain is getting better. When we all have better brains, our capacity for joy increases, and the interpersonal effects of that joy spreads across communities and across the world.
Our modern world values specialisation. Imagine a translucent sphere, the sphere of all human knowledge. Imagine the centre of the sphere as your knowledge as a child, a tiny dot. As you grow and learn, your dot expands into a ball, and then as you enter your late teens and twenties, the ball draws out in places. These are extensions of your knowledge into certain areas, your areas of expertise. The extensions are broad and thick, and perhaps there are multiple expansions on your ball of personal knowledge. For some people, there is one strong extension from the ball, while the rest of the ball remains homogeneously round. This projection extends out through the ball of human knowledge, getting thinner as it goes. Our culture values these projections in people, for many books are written, podcasts are recorded and articles published lionising those who single-mindedly focus on one thing to the outer limits of knowledge, beyond what others have found. This is the life of the university academic and other experts, who push their knowledge so far that, when we overlay other people’s balls upon the sphere, we find that their projections are alone, and perhaps unable to connect to others.
Now, I am not disparaging the incredible work that highly focused people do. However, I have a problem with the cultural value placed on specialisation. Instagram loves the teenager who’s been working on their bottle-flipping skill for five years, or the TED presenter who went down a rabbit hole twenty years ago and just emerged. These people are necessary, but they should not be regarded as the norm. This valuing implies that the rest of us are somehow deficient, that everyone should have a skill or knowledge that projects into a unique sphere-space, that we should all be focused enough to push through our boredom and into expertise. What we don’t see is that the experts, because of their focus, deprive themselves of broader knowledge. Most commonly this is the knowledge of the real world and its effects, and we get, as an example, the socially inept lecturer.
I reject this valuing, and instead strive to make my ball of personal knowledge as large and as bumpy as possible in all directions of the sphere. I do want to extend my ball out as far as possible, and I do have my own projections of expertise; however I’ve taken care to ensure those projections remain thick and connected to other aspects of knowledge, so I am never disconnected from the real world.
As a final note: increasing options and intelligence carries with it a personal problem: the burden of competence. Those who are competent become the ones that do the work, and the more skills one knows, the more work one can perform competently. I have met those who use weaponised incompetence as their safeguard against doing effective work, and when challenged, claim victimhood as their virtue and arrogance as my vice. Fortunately, masterful competence brings its own joyful rewards that far outweigh this pettiness, even if one must carry others to receive them. Revelling in the joyful expression of competence goes beyond arrogance and hubris and into a personal satisfaction that I cannot describe, and instead only experience, in order to touch the physical, mental and emotional power that comes with it.