In Praise of the Amateur Mind

“The internet likes experts”.

Economists talk to economists, historians talk to historians, and political analysts speak in a dialect that sounds suspiciously like PowerPoint.

I have never been very good at staying in one room.

One afternoon I’m reading about the collapse of empires, the next I’m thinking about why instagram trends behave like medieval gossip networks. Somewhere between these intersections of culture is the strange map of how people actually live.

The boundaries between these things have always felt artificial to me. History bleeds into politics, politics shapes culture, culture spills into the internet, and the internet, in its strange and chaotic way, becomes a kind of real-time anthropology of the present. Every meme is a miniature myth. Every viral trend is a rumor spreading through a digital village square.

But the modern world has a deep suspicion of people who wander too widely. We are encouraged to specialize, to choose a lane early and stay there forever. The economist should not talk about literature. The historian should not speculate about internet culture. The political analyst should certainly not try to explain memes.

The amateur, in this system, is treated as a problem.

But the word amateur has always been misunderstood. It comes from the Latin amare, which means, to love.

An amateur is simply someone who studies something out of affection rather than obligation, curiosity rather than credential.

And sometimes curiosity is the better guide.

The amateur mind is not constrained by disciplinary borders. It moves freely between centuries and subjects, looking less for mastery and more for patterns. It asks strange questions: Why do revolutions and internet pile-ons feel structurally similar? Why do certain stories repeat across history, from ancient myths to modern political narratives? Why does a meme sometimes explain human behavior better than a policy paper?

These questions may not belong neatly to any one field. But they belong very much to the world we actually inhabit.

This account is, in some sense, a notebook for that kind of thinking. A place for connecting ideas that are not supposed to be connected.

Not with the authority of an expert.

But with the curiosity of an amateur.

There is, too, a quieter realization that sits beneath all of this.

For a long time, I mistook seriousness for depth. I thought that to move between disciplines, to resist definition, to engage with many things at once, I would have to justify it by being exceptionally good at all of them. As though curiosity required credentials. As though wandering needed to earn its legitimacy through excellence.

But somewhere along the way, that logic began to loosen.

It became clear that the demand to be the best at everything I touched was not a mark of ambition, but a constraint on experience. It turned exploration into performance, and curiosity into a kind of quiet pressure.

Letting go of that expectation changed the texture of everything.

Because life, in its most honest form, is not a resume. It is not a sequence of optimized outcomes or mastered skills, neatly categorized and externally validated. It is, fundamentally, experiential. A series of encounters, fascinations, fleeting obsessions, and half-finished understandings that shape the way we see the world.

To be excellent at something is, of course, a rare and beautiful thing. There is a certain elegance in mastery, a kind of clarity that comes from deep focus and sustained attention.

But not everything we touch is meant to become a domain of expertise.

Some things exist simply to be explored. To be played with. To be engaged in without the weight of consequence or the expectation of proficiency. A book read without analysis. A thought pursued without the need to publish it. A question asked without the pressure of answering it perfectly.

There is a freedom in allowing certain pursuits to remain deliberately unserious.

In recognizing that not every interest must become an identity, and not every curiosity must become a skill.

And perhaps that, too, is part of the amateur’s advantage.

To approach the world not as something to conquer or master, but as something to move through. To notice patterns without needing to own them. To think without always needing to conclude.

To engage, simply because something is interesting.

Because, in the end…..

is it ever that deep?