# In Praise of the Dilettante — Jay Miller

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/) · [Haul 002: Goalless exploration](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/2)
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/2/in-praise-of-the-dilettante
- **Type**: Essay (The opening)
- **Creator**: Jay Miller
- **Original Source**: [Aeon](https://aeon.co/essays/why-the-dilettante-is-the-anti-hero-of-our-over-optimised-age) (30 October 2026) · 14 minutes
- **Published**: 2026-11-08

## Why it's here (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

I love the word dilettante. I think I fell in love with it as soon as I discovered it, because I consider myself a textbook case. Not the textbook definition, mind you, which is almost entirely negative. Merriam-Webster defines a dilettante as “a person having a superficial interest in an art or a branch of knowledge.” Cambridge and Collins are no kinder: someone whose understanding is shallow, who seems interested in a subject but doesn’t really know much about it.

The moment I read those definitions, I wanted to reclaim the word, because it captured an approach to intellectual life I’ve had for a long time. Jay Miller’s brilliant essay in *Aeon* reminded me of that. As luck would have it, I wrote a post a while back with almost the same title, [“In Praise of Dilettantism.”](https://bhuvan.substack.com/p/in-praise-of-dilettantism) The point I was trying to make was that there’s nothing wrong with being a dilettante, and nothing wrong with being a specialist. But unless you fuck around and find out, you’ll never really know what grabs you and speaks to you. Before you can go deep, you have to go wide. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with being a butterfly or a honeybee, constantly flitting from one interest to another.

As Miller points out, the word only became an insult relatively recently. The cult of achievement behind it, this need to be seen finishing things and sticking with them, is, for me at least, suffocating. I feel happy, joyous and, more importantly, whole precisely because I’m a dilettante and not someone who can stick with one thing for very long. I have a buffet of interests that speak to me at different points in time, and I chase each feeling to its fullest. In the process, I have an insane amount of fun doing things I otherwise never would.

Reading Miller’s essay, I wasn’t just nodding along. I was nodding so vigorously that if I were a plastic doll, my head would have come off. What I love most is how he reclaims the word. He doesn’t defend the dilettante as someone who goes wide and shallow. His dilettante is not a dabbler: they go deep, like anyone else, but never let any one interest become their identity. That ability to stay unattached, to move from one passion to the next without fretting about it, is what makes being a dilettante worth it. Or, as he puts it:

> For the dilettante, every night is karaoke night.

Strip away the pejorative baggage, and being a dilettante gives you permission to be, well, a honeybee: to go from flower to flower, tasting the nectar of many kinds, and to live a fuller life for it. In a society that reifies specialization and completion, where people think you’re serious only if you stick with something for years, the alternative feels like a prison to me.

But, as Miller also says, being a dilettante can be a lonely journey. You’re chasing the things that speak to you, without worrying about finishing them or earning invisible badges of approval from your bosses, parents, friends or society at large.

Perhaps the idea from Miller’s essay that I’ve most deeply absorbed into my own life is dilettantism as open-ended exploration, done for the delight of it, with no end or objective in mind. I first came across that philosophy in “Growth Without Goals,” a 2016 essay by Patrick O’Shaughnessy, who, among other things, hosts the amazing podcast *Invest Like the Best*. I was floored the first time I read it. I think it’s since been taken down from his old blog, but you’ll probably find it on the Internet Archive.

Ever since, I’ve tried to consciously live by that maxim: growth without goals, or dilettantism in its purest, most positive sense, not the pejorative one. So far, I’m having fun. Should everybody be a dilettante? I don’t know. People should figure shit out for themselves. But I am one, and I love being one. We live in a world where everything is seen through a utilitarian, instrumentalist, mechanistic lens. To be able to escape that oppressive yoke and experience the freedom of being a dilettante? What more can you ask for?

## Verbatim Excerpt (Source, matched word for word)

> In the dilettante’s genes is a compulsion to pursue passions, deeply coupled with a refusal to shape a life or identity permanently around any one of them. The dilettante possesses a unique capacity to dive deep into an interest, then surface and plunge into the depths of the next, each one an exploration, an adventure, but not a lifelong, life-defining project. It is precisely to hold open the possibility of the next reconnaissance mission that the dilettante rejects any dogmatic principle of stick-to-itiveness. Sometimes, the dilettante is a devout hobbyist parked on one interest for years at a stretch; sometimes, a juggler of several overlapping projects at once; and sometimes, a serial enthusiast on the hunt for the next novelty – what holds these modes together isn’t any fixed duration or rhythm of arrival and departure, but a disposition toward perpetual motion. The dilettante’s talent, energy and passion are constantly rechannelled through new outlets. Far from deficiency, dilettantism is a constant quest for abundance.
> 
> The life of the dilettante, so described, is not an especially easy one. It is a life of perpetual searching and fleeting satisfaction, in which accomplishment often arrives without accolades. Until breadth of interest is held in higher esteem, today’s dilettante will largely have to forgo public recognition and settle for a private life of pursuits and pleasures. Rarely is the dilettante widely celebrated as such. Consider someone like Susan Sontag, a novelist, critic and political activist whose wide-ranging work has earned both praise for its unconventional contributions to the intellectual life of 1960s New York and criticism for lacking rigour, for lacking substance. A ‘Win’ in the dilettante’s column, in other words, often comes with an asterisk – a conditional victory at best.
> 
> Further, the dilettante is also no pack animal; however much a part of a group one may feel, the dilettante will likely always be something of a tourist within it. The dilettante has to be comfortable travelling as a lone wolf at the margins of any community organised around a shared interest.

## Public-Domain Plate

- **Caption**: Mendelssohn plays to Goethe, 1830. Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, 1864.
- **Credit**: Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)
- **Image**: https://files.fromthedumpsterfire.com/hauls/002/plates/in-praise-of-the-dilettante.jpg