When you think of the word amateur, what comes to mind?
Is it a dynamic, engaged “Renaissance Man” willing to engage himself in any and all activities providing sustained engagement and challenge? Or is it the poorly skilled, unmotivated delinquent, unable to make the leap from hobbyist to the big leagues?
More often than not, we think of the latter.
If there is a single word which best encapsulates our collective departure from the true meaning and purpose of noble leisure, it is this word, amateur.
There was a time when being an amateur did not carry such a negative, condescending connotation. Rather than focusing on the “glass half empty” characteristics of someone who is performing at a level clearly short of professional standards, it focused on those who were passionate about a subject or skill for its own sake, for the “thrill of experience” rather than accomplishment or recognition. In other words, to be labeled an amateur was to be recognized as the opposite of boring.
The Latin root of amateur, amare, “to love”, indicates its original meaning: someone who truly loved what they were doing. A similar word, dilettante, from the Latin delectare, “to find delight in”, is finding a similar fate – rather than describing someone who intrinsically enjoys a given pursuit, it now carries a heavy dose of judgment in the form of superficiality and lack of commitment.
In his book Flow, the late psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi discusses the sad fate of both words, pointing out that our “warped” attitude towards achievement in physical or mental activities has removed almost entirely from societal debate the subjective gains from a given hobby or pursuit, focusing instead purely on standards of success and advancement. As a result, we are losing the vocabulary intended to capture the value of experience for its own sake, preferring instead to view activities purely from a career or economic standpoint.[1] Our appreciation for the intrinsic is now overshadowed by the extrinsic.
Basic, modern economics is partly to blame for this – we are constantly reminded of the “opportunity cost” of leisurely pursuits in comparison to paid ones. Why would a lawyer spend a day fixing his own car – pursuing his amateur interests as a mechanic – when he could simply pay someone else to do so while logging a few extra billable hours over the phone? Time is money: money saved by doing it himself are far outweighed by the professional, billable hours he gains, so he naturally shouldn’t bother dabbling in such amateur pursuits.
Yet this purely economic argument “presumes the fungibility of human experience: all our activities are equivalent or interchangeable once they are reduced to the abstract currency of clock time, and its wage correlate.”[2] It removes from the debate the value of a spirit of inquiry, love of learning, and desire to be “a master of one’s own stuff.” Furthermore, it degrades self-reliance to a status bordering on irrelevance.
Most importantly, though, it fails to acknowledge what the spirit of amateurism, and the spirit of noble leisure, truly offers, which is an intrinsic pleasure and satisfaction derived from a freely chosen activity which pushes our mind or body to its limits, requiring a focus and attention in which total, single-minded absorption is a necessary prerequisite. It is this “order of consciousness”, or peace of mind, which causes us to come back again and again to these activities, those which provide no benefit outside of what is contained within the activity itself, even when the activity is might be considered challenging, exhausting, or even dangerous. As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi points out:
Contrary to what we usually believe, moments like these, the best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times – although such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.[3]
This is the devoted gardener braving summer heat, the amateur rock climber ascending a new wall, the dedicated Dad cooking new recipes for the family, or the novice painter starting a new canvas. Oddly enough, as soon as the self-contained, intrinsic purpose of these activities is replaced with extrinsic ones, such as a paycheck and a livelihood, motivation and satisfaction can often plummet.
The point of these amateur pursuits is not to compete with professionals, but to harness the power of a freely chosen discipline to apply and extend one’s mental and physical skills at a time and place of one’s choosing.
It is to get into “the zone”, or create the “order in consciousness” which many psychologists now describe as the “optimal experience” or “flow” state in which one loses all concept of self and time and is instead deeply focused on the activity at hand. When done properly, we find that we simply don’t have enough attention during these activities to allow ourselves to worry about the past or the future or any other irrelevant thoughts or stimuli. And when done repeatedly, we are able to voluntarily silence the “voice in our head” and eliminate our natural predisposition for self-absorption on a recurring basis.
We literally forget about ourselves during these activities, and the ability to temporarily forget who we are appears to be quite satisfying.[4]
Amateur pursuits – those which make up the basis of noble leisure – are not a simple use of free time. They are to have an entirely different experience of one’s time, and as a result an entirely different experience of oneself, one that is arguably outside of oneself due to their ability to temporarily silence our inclination towards self-absorption. It takes a deliberate effort to ruminate on an argument from work or stress about jury duty when delicately transplanting tomato seedlings into a soft bed of soil. And this is exactly why we should be spending more time transplanting tomato seedlings into soft beds of soil.
We owe it to the youth in our lives to promote and role model the pursuit of time well spent. Perhaps the time has come to once again embrace the amateur.