A Case For Being Bad At Things

Some things are worth doing poorly because they aren't meant to be done perfectly, even when we do them to the best of our ability.

Think about a handwritten birthday card versus professionally designed ones.

The handmade version might include uneven lettering and/or spelling mistakes you had to cross out. But that's exactly what makes it valuable, since it carries the texture of effort and evidence that someone spent their unrepeatable time on you specifically.

This is a poke at the optimization lens of trying to make a conventional standard out of everything good and useful that emerges out of the proverbial primordial soup of human creativity and spontaneity.

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Sameness of scale

A most direct representation of this is the sameness of objects that have reached mass adoption into our daily lives.

We can start with the physical: buildings looking all the same via architectural templates, news headlines having the same cadence and structure, and packaged goods converging at the same color schemes and fonts that market research has blessed.

On a more intangible level, experiences have gotten more standardized too, most of us follow the same personal development frameworks and consume pretty much the same curated playlists that algorithms have determined are "optimal" for focus/relaxation.

For sure, my rational mind likes it. There is less mental energy to consume when engaged with a familiar pattern.

And I'd add that moving from things that don't scale(e.g handcrafted goods, apprenticeship models, local dialects, etc.) to things that scale (e.g mass production, online courses, standardized language, etc) has generally been a good trade for material prosperity and access.

Death of the amateur

One of the indirect representations of this optimization lens in practice is the subtle erasure of the amateur spirit, the root of which, amat, means "to love."

It results in a loss of permission to be mediocre at things we do for love. We have absorbed the idea that if you can't do something well, maybe you shouldn't do it at all.

Can't we just play for the sake of playing?

What optimization thinking misses is that many activities outside of the market economy have their value in the doing, not the output.

Much of my mental stream here is inspired by G.K. Chesterton’s loaded paradox: "If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly."

Even if it sucks, one needs to find a way to enjoy the process, because there's both an inevitable aspect of not having any other way to skip this stage, and the "stuck-ness thermometer" changes based on external stimuli that aren't within one's control.

In many ways, it really can be quite suffocating to live in what looks like a sterilized world, seemingly perfect to the tee, on the surface, like magic.

Yet the main cost is that it kills out all the aliveness from ordinary human expression.

No wonder I sometimes get drawn back to things I did badly, as it was peak aliveness at the moment. Replicating similar experiences has brought mediocre results with deliberate intention. The mind wouldn't just let go of tinkering with possible outcome(s) of the process.


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