Exhortation: Go Ahead and Be an Amateur
Professionals need not apply
Most countries have their version of Labor Day. In America, we’ve made it to another one, signaling the end of summer. For me, it’s a time honored tradition to engage in a kind of self-pitying melancholy. Mood-wise, I half expect to find Gatsby face down in his pool at the end of every summer. The summer of my mind never quite arrives to match up with the summer I’ve had, but it’s still my favorite season (and everything is fine).
Our Labor Day owes its origins and Federal recognition to a railroad strike. The mail must run on time, President Cleveland intervenes, and the military and the striking contingents each murder some people in the ordinary course of business.
Etc.1
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So it’s time to get back to work, which brings me to the French painter Henri Rousseau. Born in 1844, he was a toll collector working in Paris when he started painting regularly (in his 40s). He was dismissed (or praised, depending on the agenda of the speaker) as le Douanier, or the “custom’s officer” by his peers (and it’s a tough group of peers, given the salon scene in France at the end of the 1800s). His form of primitive or naive art was regarded as something of a trainwreck—here was a man with no formal training painting jungle landscapes and other subjects, heedless to conventions like perspective, scale or color theory. Rousseau also didn’t leave Paris to observe his subject matter—he was approaching these exotic subjects as they appeared in his imagination (swept up in and expressing the public’s then-fascination with far off biomes, he only had access to these subjects from popular illustrations, botanical gardens, etc.). His first jungle landscape on exhibition in 1891 was savaged to such an extent that he didn’t exhibit another for many years.
Rousseau kept at it. His works were eventually displayed in art shows next to Matisse (to some fanfare) and Picasso became an admirer and purchaser of his works (first buying one of Rousseau’s self-portraits from the equivalent of a Goodwill). Picasso and Apollinaire eventually threw a dinner in Rousseau’s honor in 1908, which is widely and better covered elsewhere.
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All of this has me thinking about our careers. Rousseau’s impact on art (however we might want to measure such a thing) doesn’t happen if he decides he’s just a toll collector. Our culture and the human project is impoverished as a result. How many Rousseaus are in our midst and how much cultural debt has accrued because we’ve decided we can only manage to do our primary, paid work?
Accelerated by LinkedIn and other developments, each of us is somehow expected to be the totality of our corporate byline, and not much more than that. At a party, it would be strange to tell someone first what you did in your leisure time instead of explaining your vocation when asked “what do you do?”
Our moment seems to suffer from a lack of willingness (at least publicly) to be seen as passionate about matters personal or non-lucrative, or to be seen as giving a non-trivial amount of time and attention to something that isn’t your full-time, paid work. In short, we all seem content to be customs officers. Collectively suffering for a lack of amateurism, in the older sense of the word.2
The moment requires us to take up the things that we love and treat them with as much rigor as we do our vocations. For most, this is less about professionalizing our leisure pursuits (it would rob them of some of the joy) and more about giving less of ourselves to work and keeping some powder dry for kite flying, pollinator gardens, or whatever you’re into.
I want to avoid misunderstanding on the subject of work and professionalism. I’m not advocating for the diminishment of dedicated professionals. Our age already suffers from a critical mass of people who think we have too many “experts”—as in, people who really know what they are talking about within their niche. This is a Randian fever dream and nonsense—the boat owning class isn’t keeping the flame of humanism alive. The problem I’m describing is not too many professionals devoting their lives to STEM.
I am equally not asking for people to be terminally online and to be dabblers in everything. The pressure to become an expert on matters in the newscyle is an order of magnitude worse than our ancestors had it. The news also isn’t always news—it’s something else.
A revival of amatuerism is also not as simple as (i) having hobbies (e.g., that you always dutifully executed your obligations as part of your fantasy sports league or habitually paid money to show up to run a fixed distance somewhere might be a worse legacy than having no hobbies to speak of—you’ve just been captured by a market); or (ii) having and believing in the primacy of your relationships (it’s true that our satisfaction is derived form personal connections, but you’re a better friend, parent, colleague, etc. when you bring your passions to those relationships and aren’t showing up as an empty vessel, or a droll participant in some kind of experience economy marketplace).
Your primary work might be important and make many things possible (we’re all renting goods and services here after all), but your obituary, the essence of your life on Earth, can’t be a screengrab of a little box on an org chart. A person who is solely remembered as “the VP of [fill in the blank]” hasn’t really died at all, because they never actually lived.
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Potpourri
Occasionally, I’ll include some links to things that interest me or are on my mind (especially after an exhortation like this in order to keep things light, but sometimes with other features too).
Since it’s public domain, you can buy wallpaper murals of Rousseau’s work. I wish I had enough rooms to sacrifice one of their walls to this kind of treatment.
Blancpain’s Fifty Fathoms getting the Swatch moon[s]watch treatment? I’m deeply concerned and excited at the same time. Allegedly Swatch X Blancpain coming later this month.
Men who want to dress well everywhere can rejoice. Simon Crompton is here to fix our casual wardrobes as well. He’s also working on a casual style guide, which I expect will be a revolution when it’s released.
Green chartreuse shortage notwithstanding, the nuclear daiquiri is something I need to track down.
For your weekend mindset, please enjoy this ASMR/POV video of a cigar roller at work:
Railroads and the robber barons of recent antiquity also offer instructive parallels for subverting and dealing with our current crop of false prophets (Zuckerberg, Musk, Bezos, et al.), as much as we all seem to forget or dismiss this time period as an explainer for how we live now.
I’ll put my definition down here, so no one can accuse me of one of the cardinal sins of bad wedding speeches and toasts, the dreaded “the dictionary defines x as….” Amateur has its own modern associations, but I’d like us to remember its roots: from the French aimer (to love), from the older Latin amare.