The year 2022 was a good one for artificial intelligence. To make 2023 a good one for humans, make a resolution to be bad at something this year.
That sounds counterintuitive, given that new year resolutions are typically about getting better at something, whether it’s physical fitness or another language. But when you choose to be bad at something, you get to experience the joy of being an amateur in the classical sense.
Today, “amateur” tends to mean “someone who isn’t good enough at something to be paid for it,” but its root is in the Latin amare, which means “to love.” An amateur works on a skill because she loves something about how grappling with the problem changes her.
An amateur birdwatcher has a new sense of who his neighbors are, even if he still scares off most of the birds with his footfalls. An amateur artist scrutinizes the planes of a face until the familiar seems strange, even if the resulting drawing is likewise strange. An amateur martial artist can’t win a fight yet, but she’s discovered new ways her body can move.
When I taught statistics as an adjunct professor in New York City, I was primarily trying to teach my students how to be bad at math. They probably would have said they already had a lot of experience being bad at math — almost none were in my class by choice; they were forced by distribution requirements. But I could tell from the first day that they were bad at being bad at math.
When I asked questions, many students froze and flinched. Students would try offering random numbers in an attempt to get me to go away. They tried to prove they didn’t have the right answer, so I’d ask someone else. For most math, they knew they could rely on someone with a better answer — a classmate, a calculator — and they wanted to defer and delegate.
Because of their evasive tactics, I had to plan my own countermoves. I started giving pop quizzes in the middle of our three-hour session, on the material we’d just covered. They had 10 minutes to work (or panic), and then they got to keep the quiz sheets, turning them in only at the end of the class.
I wanted them to get some of the benefits of homework before they went home. Homework is only partially about drilling skills and applying formulae. I saw homework as most useful when it was practice in sitting with queasiness. I knew the students would find that what seemed straightforward when they were watching me do it was often much harder when they shifted from being spectators to practitioners.
I also knew my students weren’t likely to take another math class after mine. I wanted to give them a chance to become a little more statistically literate, to catch a little of my joy in what made math beautiful. But most of all, I wanted them to practice sitting through that queasiness and finding something on the other side.
At the beginning of every semester, I told them there was one time I could guarantee they’d use what I was teaching:
“There’s going to be a day — I don’t know how far away it is — when someone you love is going to have a medical crisis. The doctor is going to come into the room and rattle off a lot of numbers, and then look to you for a decision. I don’t need you to remember everything you learn here for that moment. You just need to expect that you can make sense of those numbers, if you take some time to struggle with them.”
In that moment, and everywhere else, I wanted them to believe that “I don’t know this” isn’t a closed door, but an invitation to exploration. It’s a hard idea to hold onto, if you’re used to only doing what you do well.
AI-generated text and art isn’t a new problem — it’s the acceleration of the way amateurism is already being crowded out by advances in technology. Long before we began streaming music, radio and records began squeezing out communal singing. While farms were full of shared work songs, offices are full of earbuds.
But today, when we seem to compete with everyone everywhere, it’s tempting to shift to being a consumer, not a creator. It’s easy to find something better than what you could do yourself, and therefore shrug and not even try.
It’s much less tempting to take the time to be bad at something, in order to know that thing deeply.
When you have toddlers, like I do, you often see them trying to push the edge of their mastery. They are unashamed of failing. Maria Montessori, in her close observations of children, wrote, “The child does not follow the law of the least effort, but a law directly contrary. He uses an immense amount of energy over an unsubstantial end.”
We all face the temptation to turn away from the invitation to exert maximum effort toward a dubious end. But it’s the small experience of being bad at things, repeatedly, and finding something of worth on the other side that lets us trust it’s worth struggling when the stakes are high.
I’m not suggesting that you try to do everything badly. I’m more likely to try to learn to patch my plaster walls than to extend a gas line. All I ask is that you pick something to be bad at, and a friend who will help by watching you being bad at it.
It’s easy to look at the glossy, photoshopped and auto-tuned output of our social-media feeds and think no one is an amateur anymore. Everyone is a student of the people around them; make sure you’re teaching others that the only people who aren’t struggling are the ones who aren’t growing.
Leah Libresco Sargeant is the author of “Arriving at Amen” and “Building the Benedict Option.” She runs the substack Other Feminisms, focused on the dignity of interdependence.