Polymaths
There aren’t enough polymaths anymore. Back in the day, all the greats were a little bit of everything. The scientists were allowed to talk about art. The artists were expert mathematicians. Its in the overlap where life gets interesting. But you can’t ‘see’ the overlap unless you… overlap. Go google famous polymaths. Look what comes up. Aristotle. Ol’ B Franklin. Sir Isaac Newton. Buncha guys who we all know centuries later, and none of us negate the fact that they were really, really smart.
I think the introduction of specialization is what killed humanity. It has proliferated every part of being a human: sports, education, job, everything is about specialization. Look at kids these days. I literally watched a third-grade football game the other day with the same intensity that I watch the Indianapolis Colts run into each other. These kids are eight. Why are they so aware of where the end zone is? Why are they not just running around smiling? It's like you can't do something unless you're going to do it your entire life, to do that thing, and you're going to be the best at that thing. Your life blinks way later, and you have only done one thing.
Eventually, you start to get tunnel vision. You can't see how all of the things slightly overlap. You can't see the oneness in everything.
Take a career. I feel for highschoolers. You're being asked to figure out exactly what you want to do when you have exactly no idea about pretty much anything except what it means to be in a family and what it means to have some friends or not have any friends. You pick a major. You go to college, you go to the entry level that's as close to that major as humanly possible, and maybe you bounce around within that department. You don't have enough time to be many things.
You can be a stay-at-home mom, or you can work. Good luck trying to work and be a stay-at-home mom. I'm less interested in why we no longer have polymaths, because the why is pretty easy. We've focused entirely on external validation and made our lives on paper a lot more important than our lives day to day. What I'm interested in is how the heck these smart dudes found enough time to be polymaths.
So that's the question I'm going to drop down today and try to answer. What about modern civilization is killing the multi-modal human?
First, it's how you measure life. You can have a season. Let's look at nature. Nature has, in many parts of the world, four seasons. There's the hermit season, the growth season, the hot-as-hell season, and the one where you finally get to harvest.
What if, in the hermit season, you do the activity that's able to be done when the sun sets early, when it's cold outside? That doesn't just literally mean the three months, or whatever, if you're lucky enough to live in a four-season place. What if you look at a human lifetime and say, "I'm in my hermit season, I'm in my growth season, I'm in my hot-as-hell season"? You may look at things a little bit differently.
It's our relationship with the clock and our relationship with time that's killing us. There's no time to wander, no time to stretch. Everything is planned ahead of time, so if you're planning, you're always gonna be stuck in the version of you that's the planner. Unless you plan from 1PM to 2PM, I will be expanding my understanding of mathematics, but maybe take a look at the totality of a life when you're judging yourself on how much you've gotten done.
Next thing: no one knows what it means to be interested anymore. We're obligated, but not interested. Our lives aren't set up in a way that says, "I’m really interested in cooking right now. For some reason, I have no idea why, but I really want to learn how to make a soufflé, and I will be making that soufflé.”
That little urge of excitement, that's really you. But if your calendar is all full and your relationships are all built on anything but unconditional love, you can't cancel that dinner date and say, "I'm sorry, I don't want to go out to dinner today. I want to make a soufflé."
Or maybe you're just feeling really, really isolated and you just want to have a drink and look at the hillside. Do you have people in your life that you can call up and say, "How's the hillside sound like today? Any interest in a bottle of wine?" No, because they're at their day job. The company you keep is very important. If you surround yourself with day job people, you're going to be alone, and a bottle of wine hits one body a lot harder than two.
I guess there's a breeziness about our past scientists and a real thought-action loop. Have desire? Chase the desire. Have a new desire? Chase that desire. There is an ability to release over and over and over that allows you to have the ego death that is required to be a polymath.
There is also an intensity that is required: an intensity to go deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, until your personal satisfaction is reached and then release. It's really a lesson than for most things in life.
For some reason, what comes up to me next is relationships. I think it'd be very easy to go down the path of going deep, deep, deep, deep with one person and then, when they're no longer interesting, hop off that ship and go to another. I don't think that's how the best relationships work. I think the best relationships are dating one person many times for the rest of your life because there is something in the overlap, something in seeing all the versions of a person, something in seeing all the sides of one story. That gives life a juicy little middle, gives life a satisfaction at the end.
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What I’ve learned from myself.
Hold your identity loosely
Learn to hear and act on your desires
