u/MikeAraki

A predictable ritual unfolds whenever a young person dares to write the forbidden sentence: "I’m a polymath."

Someone asks for a list of accomplishments. Someone else invokes Leonardo, Goethe, or Franklin. Then come the dismissals: you are curious, scattered, a dilettante, ADHD, probably just interested in too many things.

Due to strange trends, the word "polymath" is now treated by many as a posthumous honorific, available only after society has installed your statue among the intellectual gods.

Naturally, there's the platitude that no one should mistake early curiosity, or even unusually broad interests, for demonstrated mastery across several fields. That's event and I don't understand the need to viciously state such obviety.

But the vicious ritual also confuses two different claims.

Detractors read “I am a polymath” as a conclusion about one's accomplishments: a claim that one has already attained sufficient breadth, depth, integration, and contribution. If not how can they dare warrant such a prestigious label!

That is an extremely difficult claim for anyone to make about themselves, especially early in life. And I don't think that anyone with minimal sanity is claiming that when they go online for support and say "I'm a polymath."

Dear young person, in order to avoid all these unnecessary altercations, I suggest you just add two letters:

“I am polymathic.”

Or, if you want to be more technically precise:

“I have a polymathic orientation.”

Polymathic orientation is a psychological disposition toward pursuing, developing, and applying knowledge across multiple domains. However, like all constructs related to the umbrella term polymathy, it must satisfy three criteria:

• breadth: a commitment to being wide ranging.

• depth: a commitment to rigor, sustained learning, and real competence rather than superficial sampling;

• integration: a tendency and preparedness to connect, synergize, synthesize, such that your breadth and depth are not inert.

This is not a declaration that you are Leonardo daVinci. It is a description of how you want to approach and mobilize knowledge.

You may be young, still learning, and nowhere near the accomplishments that would lead others to use polymath as an honorific (which I'm personally very uninterested in). But you can definitely have a polymathic orientation. And that realization can help organize your life around developing breadth without shallowness, depth without confinement, and integration in a very productive manner.

The distinction matters because people need language for a direction before they have a monument.

This, a young person who says, “I am developing my polymathic orientation,” is not claiming a completed trajectory. They are useful a rich and meaningful name to describe a serious long-range commitment: to learn widely, work deeply, and build connections across the boundaries that organize most people's intellectual lives. That's extremely powerful.

For the detractors, “polymath” may remain a label that others apply retrospectively to myths and legends.

“Polymathic” is available in the present tense.

Use it.

I sometimes see a version of this claim: people who are truly polymathic do not spend much time debating the meaning of polymathy because they are too busy learning, practicing, creating, building things, etc..

I think this view misses many important points.

The first that came to mind is that they are forgeting about survivorship bias. When they give examples, it is almost certainly mature polymathic adults who have been successful in "figuring it out" and are now at the polymathic creation stage. I agree--they are truly busy!

But that is not where anyone starts.

Drawing on psychosocial development models, such as Erik Erikson’s, it is important to remember that there are stages in life when we are especially vulnerable. I would single out the stage Erikson called "identity versus confusion," which begins at around age 12. At that point, a person is trying to make sense of who they are in relation to themselves and to the world. And, as I mentioned in another post, it is terrible when the labels that the worl throws at you are mostly negative like jack-of-all-trades, scattered, unfocused, etc.

My hypothesis is that if many accomplished polymathic adults were asked to recall that earlier period, when they were younger, less confident, and less able to situate themselves in this noisy and complex world, many would probably say that having a good, positive label would have made a difference.

Now, thinking like an economist, we do not know how muc polymathic talent was discouraged because, at the margin, they missed a small advantage: perhaps a single, more positive word that could have helped them put things together sooner.

In sum, the gist of my objection is this: dismissing the value of using the label "polymathic" may harm the very people who need it most. Then, through survivorship bias, we end up seeing only those who made it through without the label, while overlooking those who might have been helped by it earlier.

Thus, viciously attacking the use of the label strikes me as analytically mistaken and lacking empathy for people who are still trying to make sense of themselves!

EDIT: I am shocked and saddened by the very poor reading comprehension displayed by some commenters. Gee, nowhere in this post do I call *myself* a polymath! I struggle to understand why some people here are so triggered by something I never even claimed. It is almost like they are searching for something to revolt against and be vicious about! I am seriously concerned about the mental health of these people. I am also sorry for those who have been here longer, tried to initiate meaniginful converstaions but, ultimately, had to endure this kind of wicked, infantile behavior.

People with wide-ranging interests don’t often have good names for themselves…

jack-of-all-trades,

dilettante,

scattered,

unfocused,

restless,

undisciplined,

generalist.

A popular list but with no truly positive option.

When I came across the term polymath*, I felt relieved. That was really the sensation; finally, a word to describe something those other labels never could: a way of life that aspires to conjugate breadth, depth, and integrate them in the pursuit, development, and application of knowledge.

No word I had known until then came close to this richness of meaning.

Fast-forward 15 years, "polymath" mushroomed in popularity and some even call it a buzzword now!

But what surprises and saddens me are some comments from social media users like this:

“Why do we need one more label?”

“How about not labelling at all?”

“Why put yourself in another box?”

“Don’t bother about words”

“Labels only feed the ego.”

I understand the concern. Labels can be misused. People can overidentify with them, turning a useful description into a fixed identity.

But this argument completely misses the mark when it comes to polymathy or polymathic identity!

For many polymathic people, the absence of a good label has not been freedom. It has been part of a really bad confinement.

The bad labels were already there. They were socially available, casually used, and often internalized—to the psychosocial detriment of polymathic people!

That makes the objection to using polymathy, and particularly the self-description polymathic, absurd.

“Polymathic” is not self-aggrandizing. It gives a concise, positive, and historically grounded descriptor for a real pattern that is hard to carry and even harder to communicate.

It does not have to become an “ego category” or another cage.

We, humans, use heuristics. We name and label. Every one of us does that, even polymaths. It is futile to resist this. But it's not futile to seek to find better names and labels, which can carry meaning in more nuanced and compelling ways.

A good label can help people recognize a pattern in themselves, communicate it to others, and stop interpreting their own cardinal characteristics as a defect.

Finding a better name may be a key step to a more fulfilling existence to polymathic people. Therefore, I praise the use of polymath and its lexical derivatives!

* I have written a LinkedIn post on why I do prefer polymathic over polymath.

People with wide-ranging interests don’t often have good names for themselves…

jack-of-all-trades,

dilettante,

scattered,

unfocused,

restless,

undisciplined,

generalist.

A popular list but with no truly positive option.

When I came across the term polymath*, I felt relieved. That was really the sensation; finally, a word to describe something those other labels never could: a way of life that aspires to conjugate breadth, depth, and integrate them in the pursuit, development, and application of knowledge.

No word I had known until then came close to this richness of meaning.

Fast-forward 15 years, "polymath" mushroomed in popularity and some even call it a buzzword now!

But what surprises and saddens me are some comments from social media users like this:

“Why do we need one more label?”

“How about not labelling at all?”

“Why put yourself in another box?”

“Don’t bother about words”

“Labels only feed the ego.”

I understand the concern. Labels can be misused. People can overidentify with them, turning a useful description into a fixed identity.

But this argument completely misses the mark when it comes to polymathy or polymathic identity!

For many polymathic people, the absence of a good label has not been freedom. It has been part of a really bad confinement.

The bad labels were already there. They were socially available, casually used, and often internalized—to the psychosocial detriment of polymathic people!

That makes the objection to using polymathy, and particularly the self-description polymathic, absurd.

“Polymathic” is not self-aggrandizing. It gives a concise, positive, and historically grounded descriptor for a real pattern that is hard to carry and even harder to communicate.

It does not have to become an “ego category” or another cage.

We, humans, use heuristics. We name and label. Every one of us does that, even polymaths. It is futile to resist this. But it's not futile to seek to find better names and labels, which can carry meaning in more nuanced and compelling ways.

A good label can help people recognize a pattern in themselves, communicate it to others, and stop interpreting their own cardinal characteristics as a defect.

Finding a better name may be a key step to a more fulfilling existence to polymathic people. Therefore, I praise the use of polymath and its lexical derivatives!

* I have written a LinkedIn post on why I do prefer polymathic over polymath.

EDIT: I am shocked and saddened by the very poor reading comprehension displayed by some commenters. Gee, nowhere in this post do I call *myself* a polymath! I struggle to understand why some people here are so triggered by something I never even claimed. It is almost like they are searching for something to revolt against and be vicious about! I am seriously concerned about the mental health of these people. I am also sorry for those who have been here longer, tried to initiate meaniginful converstaions but, ultimately, had to endure this kind of wicked, infantile behavior.