Generalists in the Age of Specialists

Howdy, I realized I just stopped writing when school started to get stressful. I miss days when I have time on my hands. Now I’m on break, I feel so free and joyful. What a good day to have free time.

This topic has always been in the back of my head, especially being a college freshman trying to pick a major. Of course I couldn’t do that to myself, that’s why I’m currently enrolled in three different majors… Let’s see how many I actually will finish. Picking only one specialty to me feels like being jailed. But yes, I do realize I need a spacialty to be useful in this society; and of course, how useful I am is proportional to how valuable my life is.

I’m quite fascinated by this mechanical system that we live in, and I think about it quite often too. Capitalism was argued by Adam Smith to be the ‘natural state’ of human beings. Sure, people trade things out of self-interest. But he forgot to mention that it is the darkest side of human nature that governs capitalism, the greed and materialistic side of us. Being natural isn’t always the best thing, though people love to use that as an argument. GMOs aren’t harmful just because it’s unnatural, and greed shouldn’t be celebrated just because it’s human nature. Unfortunately, we live in a system that takes from the genuine and rewards the greediest. Similar to our political system, it doesn’t promote the best leader for the people, it encourages the most power-hungry and self-absorbed people to take over the country. Do they actually give a shit about the hardworking citizens? Not really.

I often think about how specialized and isolated math is, though of course that’s not a result of capitalism, it’s just math getting more complicated than ever that a single person simply cannot be an expert in every field. A mathematician like Euler, Euclid, Gauss, Kepler, or even Lagrange and Laplace, would probably never appear again in math. Even the Mozart of modern mathematics, Terrence Tao, has a specialty in combinatorics. The problem with this is that it makes researching mathematicians feel isolated and lonely—no one except ten other peers in their extremely specialized area knows what in the world they’re doing—the same feeling workers have working in the industrialized system. Except workers are also forced to turn against each other for the profit of the rich at the top.

The system we live in is evolving into a machine that only cares about productivity. Why are they turning the creative, kind, loving human into parts of machines? I don’t understand. Starting from pre-school, you learn to walk in a pack in uniforms and uniformed motion. I suppose it’s too pricy to preserve both productivity and humanity. Only a Pawn in Their Game. I studied Bob Dylan’s lyrics when I was thirteen, trying to learn English. This song has stuck with me ever since. The lyrics just feel appropriate right now:

To cope with the grief that parts of us are dying daily as sacrifices to a well-working system, we are prescribed medication, therapy, and drugs. It’s not you, it’s me (lol). I’m the one that’s sick, abnormal, and manic, not the system. Oh and to cope with isolation and alienation, they are friends invented just for you.

You might still argue that capitalism is working, just with a price—millions of people’s lives and your own sanity.

(okay I’m done ranting about this)

Back to the title: why be a generalist?

From a future job statistics point of view:

So why in the world would you want to be a generalist when you live in a system that is constantly pushing you to be a specialist, a screw in a monstrous machine? Because though the structure of the system generally stays the same, the content is constantly evolving. Because of industrialization, technologies change so rapidly that the measurement of usefulness changes along with that. The demand for skill changes, fast! About 60% of jobs in 2018 did not exist in 1940, and 10% of workers hired in 2024 are in roles that didn't exist in 2000. So it’s best to be an adaptable and well-versed screw, or else you’ll be screwed.

We still don’t know how the trajectory of the AI development will affect the job market, but we know that it’s easier to make a specialized AI than generalized AI, hence why AGI is still a fictional buzz word. Another reason to make yourself a generalist in the current day and age.

Afterall, this is the point of view when one submits to the system and tries to survive in it, which I’ll eventually have to do… What a curse!

From my personal point of view:

I personally hate the idea of specialization because I’d like to think I’m rebelling against it by not conforming to it, and through this I gain some sense of self. I don’t think this feeling of mine could be explained as logically as what I explained earlier, with statistics and all. But if you’re able to understand what I’m talking about, you’d understand me by now.

But to compromise with it as I am forced to, I aspire to be a ‘T-shape person’. I remember learning this idea on YouTube a while ago: the top horizontal bar of ‘T’ represents the breadth of your knowledge in different areas. Though not an expert you have a good idea of things. The vertical bar down represents your expertise, which could be in any area. Steve Jobs had expertise in rhetoric, but he also had enough knowledge in electronics, design, and engineering to make the product. That’s the basic idea of it.

I realize this sounds very hypocritical coming from me because I was born into a family who was benefited from capitalism. I should be content and happy with whatever is happening, but I can’t explain why I’m not.

Everything eventually ends, a life, a story, or an economic system. There are signs that we are moving into late capitalism (or according to Werner Sombart we’re already in it), you can judge for yourself whether it’s a good sign or a bad sign.

Thanks for reading to the end! Please subscribe, I’ll do my best to post more consistently! To my current subscribers, I know you probably forgot that you ever signed up for this newsletter, but that’s okay:) Thank you so much for sticking with me to the end. Have a wonderful Christmas and Hanukkah and New Year!