A small form of resistance
January 18, 2021 4:52 PM   Subscribe

“...'Dilettante' is one of those words which deter people from taking up new pursuits as adults. Many of us are wary of being dismissed as dabblers, people who have a little too much leisure, who are a little too cute and privileged in our pastimes. This seems a narrative worth pushing back against. We might remember, as Vanderbilt points out, that the word 'dilettante' comes from the Italian for 'to delight.'" Margaret Talbot on learning new skills as an adult.

It pairs well with Casey Johnston (Ask a Swoll Woman) "on the extremely difficult chore of getting to know yourself, asking what it is that you want, and giving yourself permission to take yourself seriously."
posted by The corpse in the library (33 comments total) 108 users marked this as a favorite
 
Thanks for sharing! As one very rapidly approaching middle age (or maybe I'm already in it), this hit a nerve for me. I appreciated the section detailing how certain cognitive abilities rise and fall at different ages and that there is no specific age when we're at our peak because some aspects are great when we're young (processing speed) but other aspects can only come with age and experience.
posted by NotTheRedBaron at 5:14 PM on January 18, 2021 [5 favorites]


Oh, this also resonates so well with me... Especially as I'm trying to hold steady against the (socially encouraged) impulse to monetize it somehow to justify the time and resources spent.
posted by cendawanita at 5:46 PM on January 18, 2021 [15 favorites]


Oh hell yes, carry on.
posted by Oyéah at 5:49 PM on January 18, 2021 [3 favorites]


"Well, I am a dilettante. It's only in England that dilettantism is considered a bad thing. In other countries it's called interdisciplinary research."
Brian Eno
posted by thatwhichfalls at 6:04 PM on January 18, 2021 [50 favorites]


I am very about learning new skills. Before Covid struck I decided that I would take up piano because I had always wanted lessons as a kid but for some reason my parents wouldn't sign me up for it. I am absolutely hilariously terrible and I love it. I love working at a piece and seeing it get better and better as I put time into it. I hit a seven month roadblock while lessons weren't available (I didn't even consider online would be a possibility!), but I'm back at it and improving. I am 39 years old and in like grade 2B and I suck but am getting better and I think that's awesome. I do delight, thanks!

It's interesting the connection the first piece draws between fighting back against perfectionism and learning new skills. I think I used to be a perfectionist when I was younger, but I have taken up many hobbies to varying degrees of success and I think I just have come to terms with the idea that there is no real such thing as perfect. I wonder if the two are connected for me.

I really enjoyed these links, thanks for this post!
posted by urbanlenny at 6:15 PM on January 18, 2021 [7 favorites]


Talbot's article is great; making a distinction between doing new things to prove one's virtues, and doing new things to find them out. It recalls Rafael Behr's great line describing the British PM as in thrall to the 'public school cult of effortless dilettantism that despises diligence as vulgar and swotty', seeking Asquith's 'tranquil consciousness of effortless superiority'. That dilettantism is very much about insecurity, and the fear of being found out as ordinary, average, someone who has to work at things to be good, and maybe fail. That's an even more toxic variant of perfectionism, which seeks self-respect as the consequence of one's class! I'm a believer in failure, myself; I can't think of anything worthwhile I've ever learned without fucking something up.
Maybe the best thing learning to structure exercise can do for us is actually not making us hot (!), or even healthy, but listening to and being patient and generous with ourselves, even when we are doing our dumb little tasks...
This strongly recalls Henry Rollins' (in)famous Iron and the Soul:
I have never met a truly strong person who didn’t have self-respect. I think a lot of inwardly and outwardly directed contempt passes itself off as self-respect: the idea of raising yourself by stepping on someone’s shoulders instead of doing it yourself. When I see guys working out for cosmetic reasons, I see vanity exposing them in the worst way, as cartoon characters, billboards for imbalance and insecurity. Strength reveals itself through character. It is the difference between bouncers who get off strong-arming people and Mr. Pepperman.

Muscle mass does not always equal strength. Strength is kindness and sensitivity. Strength is understanding that your power is both physical and emotional.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 6:29 PM on January 18, 2021 [12 favorites]


Great articles, and I'd love to read some of the books the New Yorker piece mentions, especially Nell Painter's Old in Art School.

Noting "dilettante" comes from "delight" reminds me that "amateur" means "one who loves."

I have thought a lot about a lot of this: resisted the monetize-everything advice of family, wrestled with being pretty awful at various things I try (my drawings still make me cringe a lot, especially human faces). I've been learning Japanese on my own for over 7 years, and the extremely part-time nature of my studying and my haphazard approach mean that progress feels really slow sometimes. (And then, other times, it seems kind of good, when I can read simple stories, or puzzle out a quarter of the dialog in a slow-spoken Japanese movie.)

I'm interested in way, way too many things to make good progress in any of them: I want to learn Japanese and improve my rudimentary Spanish and French and German and Italian; I want to play guitar and piano and ukulele and bass; I want to learn jazz standards and music theory and pop songs; I want to build about a dozen websites, and write poems, and learn to draw better, and write a novel-ish sort of thing. There aren't enough hours in the day, or the week, to pursue all of those in a way that feels like progress. I've tried. Repeatedly.

Just very recently, I'm finding a renewed sense of dedication from thinking of all of these things as practices, in the sense of a meditation practice. I'm not learning Japanese, so much as I'm practicing Japanese, as part of my Japanese practice. I have a guitar practice. I have a writing poetry practice.

For me, these practices evoke many of the aspects of a meditation practice: persistence, letting go of ego (wanting to be good at something), trying to be in the moment, doing the thing regardless of how fulfilling it feels on a given day. They're also experiments: science as practice. How did today's drawing go? What did I learn? What might I do differently next time?

One possible purpose for life is to be fully yourself, since there will only ever be one you. Exploring any pursuit, any practice, at any age, can be a way of being more fully yourself, learning how the person you are makes a mark on paper, orders words, plucks a string.

Every age - every day - is a good day for that.

Thank you so much for posting this, The corpse in the library. I appreciate the opportunity to mull these thoughts with everyone here.
posted by kristi at 6:39 PM on January 18, 2021 [44 favorites]


THANK YOU.

I still have a chip on my shoulder from reading Angela Duckworth's Grit, which extolled the virtues of abandoning everything but one thing in which you will become the BEST AT. I have always been satisfied with merely being good at a lot of things. People who don't do those things are always impressed anyway. People who don't knit don't care that I can't do lace, they think it's so cool I can make a scarf with cabling. They don't care that my anatomy is not perfect because I can draw more than a stick person. And so on and so forth. So there's really no one to scoff at my imperfection other than myself.

I was going to say it's been a while since I tried something new, but this reminded me I tried my hand at poetry a little ago. I didn't stop because I did badly, I actually quite liked the poems I wrote and so did my friends. I just, uh, totally forgot about it.

The main danger in dilettantism is having enough hobbies to forget about some entirely...
posted by brook horse at 6:42 PM on January 18, 2021 [17 favorites]


Hah. It has literally never occurred to me that there might be something wrong with trying new stuff as a middle-aged person. There are so many cool things out there that I haven't had a chance to learn yet, and why shouldn't I try them? If I say that learning new things is a longstanding hobby that I have been working on since I was a very young child, does that absolve me from being a dilettante? I have really honed the skill of not giving a shit if people judge me for trying to learn stuff just because it looks like it would be cool to learn.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:54 PM on January 18, 2021 [9 favorites]


grandma used to call it dilly-dally.
posted by clavdivs at 7:12 PM on January 18, 2021 [1 favorite]


I find people draw a distinction between potentially useful skill and, for lack of a better word, more academic learning. Taking up a hobby like woodworking, at least to the people I know, is more understandable than taking a class in, say, the works of Soren Kierkegaard (or anything just for interest and not related to some career development something). I feel like there is this nagging social pressure for any learning to be for something, and that learning for pure joy of learning is the domain of children and something adults grow out of.

One of my hobbies is signing up for classes in whatever catches my interest on coursera or edX. I still enjoy doing homework, like a nerd.
posted by selenized at 7:26 PM on January 18, 2021 [9 favorites]


Oh I love this! I took up figure skating at 42 and at my current level, I am taking classes with 12 to 16 yr olds. I used to feel a little awkward getting ready to take the ice with my class, as my chronological peers (who are my classmates' parents) settled themselves down to shiver for the hour under blankets on the bleacher, believing they must all think I'm crazy and ridiculous. But lately I've been thinking, if I were them, I'd be jealous of me.
posted by Tandem Affinity at 7:28 PM on January 18, 2021 [41 favorites]


Thank you100. I'd long despaired of feeling welcome at trying a new skill because of the seeming death of dilettantism; at some indefinite point in adolescence, it seemed like, to pick one example, either people didn't know the rules of chess or they had a national ranking. No in-between. I started playing RPGs in my forties, and while I have met a lot of people who are patient and fun to play with, I've also met some absolute shits who don't seem to understand or care that there are things with just about any system that are non-intuitive and/or absurdly overcomplicated. (And then they wonder why they have difficulty getting people to show up for games.) But I'm not interested in going through the rest of my life, however long that is, as just a tourist or spectator.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:34 PM on January 18, 2021 [4 favorites]


I had just started getting into choral singing when the pandemic shut it down.
posted by matildaben at 8:15 PM on January 18, 2021


Isn't the best thing about retirement or getting rich that you can be a full-time dilettante?
posted by hypnogogue at 8:47 PM on January 18, 2021 [16 favorites]


I'll never know, but it sounds right.
posted by j_curiouser at 8:49 PM on January 18, 2021 [7 favorites]


This is my jam.

I am very clear that I work only so I can afford hobbies, and refuse with the violence of sand grinding into my cornea, the idea of monetization.

I've considered it, as I have spare 'art products' and 'craft products' that people pay a lot of money for on etsy, and I spend a lot of money on supplies.

I remind myself that I like making the stuff, but I don't even like etsy enough to browse the site, let alone get good at selling thru the platform. My enjoyment is making, not taking pictures, writing cute descriptions, responding to email/complaints, and running to the post office at the drop of a hat.

Those things are work... and my hobbies are important enough to me that I refuse to destroy their enjoyment by making them into work. Trade or gift a friend? Heck yes, but that's not work at all.
posted by esoteric things at 11:17 PM on January 18, 2021 [11 favorites]


I always assumed a lot of the bitterness toward dilettantism was due to the fact the majority of people who are, shall we say, performatively dilettantish have enough time and money to afford to be.

I support a UBI is because it allows a lot of people the chance to live their life in this way. I say that as someone who would hate to do so personally but see so many people who would love the opportunity to you know, enjoy their life.
posted by fullerine at 12:20 AM on January 19, 2021 [3 favorites]


Super interesting. I've gotten to a high level proficiency in 3 languages as an adult, and each of them completely hijacked my life for a while. I think that's my personal issue when it comes to acquiring skills as an adult...I hate being bad at things, so if I'm gonna do it I want to Do It Right. These days I try hard to prevent myself from starting anything new not because I am embarassed, but because I'm afraid it will hijack my life.

That said, as language study becomes less the focus of my time, I think a lot about something that the article didn't really cover, which is how to frame one's place in a given community. That is to say, let's say one wants to be proficient at chess...it's extremely unlikely that said person will be a very competitive player, so it's all for Love of The Game. At that point, what's a good way to think about the time spent on something competitive like that?

Another good example of the above is studying language. Of course there are lots of ways to get fluent, but a lot of people sort of just...diddle daddle for a long time and don't get anywhere. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but for me a big part of skill acquisition is, well, acquiring a skill. So I dunno. For example, I've thought about getting into Go recently (thus the chess example above), but like...I'm never going to be truly competitive, but it's a deep game that one can spend a lot of time on. So "should" I just like...spend a bunch of time just to be mediocre at a game nobody cares about? Nothing wrong with that at all! But it's just hard for me to think about that vs the myriad other things one can do with their time...
posted by wooh at 1:23 AM on January 19, 2021 [1 favorite]


Megami I feel you so hard on that pledge -- I made the same pledge last year!!
posted by wooh at 1:28 AM on January 19, 2021


I learned to fence in my forties and got to be nationally competitive because they let me. And because I let myself. Permission is key, whether from others or from yourself.
posted by Peach at 6:46 AM on January 19, 2021 [10 favorites]


There's room for a term that isn't pejorative to describe activities that are done out of passion or necessity, without even any aspirations to professionalism. The economic impact of housework, emotional labor, and other obligations to family and community have been discussed here before. And as professional services get more expensive, access to troves of information to help a novice out are more accessible than ever.
Yeah, a bunch of disparate thoughts, but I think there's room to expand these articles and their ideas beyond the New Yorker-ish examples presented.
posted by St. Oops at 8:03 AM on January 19, 2021


Still trying to paint at (almost) 52. Much improved from 10 years ago, but lord it's been a slog. I've started the last four or five years with a strong January and then. And here we are again! I started in December though, and am feeling more hopeful this time. Maybe I felt the same those other times. It doesn't matter! Just keep going.

May we all find joy in those things on which we choose to spend our time. Our limited time.
posted by Glinn at 8:23 AM on January 19, 2021 [4 favorites]


As a perennial dilettante this speaks directly to my constantly-divided interests.
posted by aspersioncast at 9:35 AM on January 19, 2021 [2 favorites]


Although as a middle-aged person I can't help but think that dilettantism is something it helped to cultivate early . . .
posted by aspersioncast at 9:37 AM on January 19, 2021


> I learned to fence in my forties and got to be nationally competitive because they let me. And because I let myself. Permission is key, whether from others or from yourself.

Same for me, for archery. I can say I'm "nationally ranked," and so long as nobody checks to see just what that ranking is, it sound so impressive.
posted by The corpse in the library at 12:13 PM on January 19, 2021 [5 favorites]


I always assumed a lot of the bitterness toward dilettantism was due to the fact the majority of people who are, shall we say, performatively dilettantish have enough time and money to afford to be.
I guess, but I also hear that kind of thing a lot from people who honestly probably could afford to have hobbies. Every knitter in the world has probably heard the whole "oh, I would love to have that kind of free time" thing, but usually the people who say that watch TV or listen to podcasts, and the only difference is that I like to knit while I'm watching TV or listening to podcasts. Or people think you're weird and obnoxious and privileged if you take adult ballet classes at the local rec center, but they wouldn't say anything like that if you spent the same amount of money on a gym membership and spent the same amount of time running on a treadmill. They don't object to you spending time and money on stuff. They object to you spending time and money on stuff that you do for the sheer fun of it, without being bothered by questions about who you think you are and why you think you're entitled to do that thing.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 12:27 PM on January 19, 2021 [14 favorites]


Yeah, it's all fun and games until all the little skills that you picked up over the years start to dovetail into one big project, and before you know it you've invented a whole new type of musical instrument that you've got no idea what to do with.
posted by MrVisible at 1:16 PM on January 19, 2021 [12 favorites]


the word 'dilettante' comes from the Italian for 'to delight.’

Bim Adewummi’s recent TAL episode on delight adds some great facets to the concept.

Thanks for the articles, they sound right up my newly-rapt-mycologist’s alley ;-D
posted by progosk at 3:28 PM on January 19, 2021 [1 favorite]


The way curiosity in adults gets reframed as “privilege” strikes me as one of the most cruel consequences of industrial capitalism, as if learning things just because they’re interesting is stealing from somebody. If you’re not so desperate and battered and exhausted from your day job that you can’t bear to engage meaningfully with one more solitary thing, then you could be self-flagellating harder or wearing an itchier hair-shirt to prove your dedication to the faceless investor class who own you body and soul.

It gets downright hilarious in tech, too, where in addition to a work resume that proves you can do the job well, you’re also supposed to have a GitHub portfolio of personal projects that additionally demonstrate your suitability for the job. Somebody who goes home and paints or writes fanfic or reads Platonic dialogues is less of a “culture fit” than somebody who goes home and does exactly what he did all day at work. The guy who build infuriatingly clacky custom keyboards with no letters on the keycaps might get a pass, but that’s as creative as you can safely get in most orgs.

You’re a part in a machine, you have a function, and to express an interest in some other task is to malfunction, and fuck the people who keep getting rich by telling us that’s how the world ought to work. Holistically we’re better off with as many curious adults expressing and being supported in their curiosity as possible, even though we know the overwhelming majority of them are not going to be “winners” in the capitalist sense. The long tail of once-in-a-generation genius or even one lucky good idea ought to drive us towards throwing as many strands of spaghetti at the wall as we possibly can, and not shaming the overwhelming majority whose strands don’t stick. Leveraging the law of large numbers is the whole point.
posted by gelfin at 6:46 PM on January 19, 2021 [9 favorites]


When so many organizations ask people to "think outside the box" it becomes a whole lot easier when a person is used to learning various different skills because they've had to solve different types of problems. Whether it's figuring their way through handicrafts (woodworking, knitting, etc) or navigating learning a new language, or trying to find different ways to create art (painting, digital art, sculpture). All of that helps expand the ways in which we think.

There's also a term that I cannot summon up right now but refers to the idea that one area of academia might come up with an incredible insight without realizing that an entirely different area of academia has be using it as a standard for years. Developing skills and interests in a broader arena can help skip that kind of legwork. "Oh, this problem already has a solution!"
posted by NotTheRedBaron at 6:59 PM on January 19, 2021 [2 favorites]


They object to you spending time and money on stuff that you do for the sheer fun of it, without being bothered by questions about who you think you are and why you think you're entitled to do that thing.

This. Dilettantism has in many ways less to do with access than inclination, and resistance to it is often less overtly classist than simply reactionary.
posted by aspersioncast at 8:02 PM on January 19, 2021 [1 favorite]


Ha! I guess I am a dilettante astronomer, then. I usually say amateur, though.
posted by Gadgetenvy at 6:59 PM on January 23, 2021 [1 favorite]


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