The DFS vs BFS way for living your life
Framing the problem in terms of search algorithms is probably not the best way to put it, and totally makes me sound like a computer geek ( which I proudly am ), but it’s the way I discuss this with one of my friends, and so that’s that. You may have also heard about it as the specialist vs generalist problem. You can explore life in a DFS fashion, diving deep into a single/few fields and becoming a specialist or follow BFS, and explore the breadth of life, and become a generalist who has a broad skill set, although not being extremely talented in any.
I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who
has practiced one kick 10,000 times.
— Bruce Lee ( ah and what if life puts you in a boxing match, will you kick your way out of it?)
You might have heard the above quote, and well it kind of represents the 21st centuries’ infatuation with specialists. We are moulded into being specialists from our childhood. Don’t take risks, don’t explore much, do what you are good at, become better at it, become a specialist in it, nobody will value you if you’re mediocre etc. And don’t get me wrong there’s no problem in being a specialist, in fact, I am probably one as well ( though I am working to change that bit by bit, still, I have a very limited skill set as of now). We put people in a specialised major in colleges, basically telling them to restrict their curiosity to a particular field, and then again we stick to a particular subfield based on our interests and well the job market.
However, I don’t know why, but I am fascinated by generalists, I find people who are able to do a wide variety of things extremely awesome, and honestly, I would judge someone’s “intelligence” based on the breadth of things they know, rather than the depth. And well it’s not really a fair thing to do, but well whatever, we all have our biases. Given how complex reality is, and how often it pushes you into unprecedented circumstances *cough* COVID *cough*, I don’t really see the sense in becoming a specialist and making yourself fragile to the changing whims of reality. But okay, being a generalist is hard, it comes with an amount of uncertainty which not everyone can be comfortable with. We are inherently not well suited for multi-tasking, and can only focus well on a single task at a time, and so handling too many diverse stuff together might be a recipe for a disaster ( leading to idioms like, don’t chase two rabbits at once ).
Now I shouldn’t exactly be writing this stuff, since I am closely associated with some academics, but my problem with specialists is also what makes me not like academia much now. I just feel that spending all your time working in a small niche field and becoming a specialist in it is kind of wasteful since life has so many interesting problems to offer. Just the idea of working on a single thing makes me suffocate, and I have no idea how people pull it off. I have a track record of leaving things the moment I get bored of them, so maybe it’s just the way I am. And well I get it, there is a lot of stuff that needs a specialist, complex stuff where you need someone who knows the ins and outs of everything required to get shit done, you need researchers to move any field forward, and it’s not an easy or trivial task, but well okay, it just doesn’t feel like the best way to live your life to me.
But well, just like there is no one single optimal search algorithm ( No, A* isn’t optimal, well, it is optimal in a sense, but the better question to ask is what is it optimal on, a good discussion on this can be found here), there’s no one optimal way to search for your purpose in life. Maybe you prefer DFS, or maybe you want to do a BFS, or maybe you want to do some crazy hybrid shit, it’s up to you, cause hey, even researcher’s are trying to figure out what’s the best way to search, and this is life you are talking about, there are no experts here :P
Anyway, that’s it for this post, I don’t know why, but the 2nd wave of COVID scares me waaaaaaay more than the first one, so dear reader, until the next one
— Stay Safe!
