A Syllabus for Generalists
In recent years, there’s a tendency towards specialism and specialists, from the job market to identities to relationships to education and more. Conversations around university education, for example, tend to be focused on high-earning job prospects, rather than on developing multidisciplinary ways of thinking. The job market tends to favor people who have had a clear, laddered path to success. The prevalence of TikTok trends, which disappear as quickly as they appear, have viewers categorizing themselves within a range of attributes, classifications that are used as bywords for a personality: “clean girl”, “softboi”, “thought daughter”, “thot daughter”, “de-influencers”, and more. Curiosity for curiosity’s sake is not discouraged, per se, but it’s not clearly monetizable either, and therefore can be deprioritized.
As a result, people are quick to try to categorize themselves based on interest or skill, as a way of telling the world who they are quickly, before an audience’s attention runs out, which can lead to tunnel vision, bias, and a sense of social entrapment. Generalists have an important place within society, working from a broad range of knowledge that brings context into the complex and nuanced circumstances humanity finds themselves in today. For example, doctors looking to improve their practices could find helpful lessons from history and philosophy—the history of humankind is also the history of generations of patients, after all. However, generalists have long faced the danger of being overlooked as the “jack of all trades, master of none”.