The Humanist Transition
My thoughts one way into the journey
Some time ago, Rob Henderson described the age 30 crisis, based on Daniel Levinson’s The Seasons of a Man’s Life: a moment, when a man few years into one’s career begins questioning their life choices and development path, even if things were going well all along. As I read about it over a year ago, I realized that this is what I’ve been struggling with for some time.
I’ve always been a science and engineering nerd, which naturally led me to graduating from a technical university and a successful career: designing jet engine hardware, then moving into data analytics. Over the years I’ve learned a lot about both hardware and software engineering and technology and managed to provide myself and my family an above-average standard of living. Nevertheless, I felt that my personal growth has been uneven, like a bodybuilder only working on his upper body:
I realized that, in order to become more complete, I need to grow my social, human side - I need to become a humanist.
Humanities? Sounds cringe.
Humanism emerged during Renaissance and is associated with the image of the Renaissance Man - a polymath with deep knowledge and many skills, like Da Vinci or Descartes - obviously admirable role models one can easily look up to.
However, during my formative years in the 2000s in Poland, “humanist” was basically a derogatory term for someone who struggles with maths in school, then gets an useless degree which pushes them into unemployment, underemployment or dead-end minimum wage jobs - nothing admirable here, move along. The stigma around humanities pushed me and many other capable and high IQ young people of my generation away from humanities and into STEM degrees.
I think the humanist loser stereotype is still alive - not as much as 20 years ago, but it’s still roaming somewhere in the back of our collective conscience, at least in Poland. Humanists are mostly perceived and discussed as an outgroup - I don’t think anyone really aspires to become a humanist (or encourages their children to do so) or fondly considers being a humanist as part of his/her identity.
This is why some of you might be shaking your heads while reading about someone trying to become a humanist.
To me, being a humanist can be something like being a driver. Depending on the context, the word “driver” can either mean someone who professionally drives trucks, busses or cars, or just a person functionally and legally capable to drive. Most people don’t choose the professional driver career path, but nevertheless, unless they’re Zoomers, at least try to get their driving license.
Similarly, you don’t have to be a liberal arts professor or someone with a degree in philosophy to be a humanist - you can simply learn about it and try to apply it for your own benefit, much like one applies driving skills to help them get around.
Soft/core skills
One good reason to become a humanist is to help with soft skills growth.
“Soft skills” is in fact a poor name, implying weakness and optionality. This can turn off, especially men - conditioned by evolution and culture to be physically hard, endure hardships and do hard things and typically considering being called “soft” an insult. Marlow CEO Mary Fox Bouygens proposed an alternate term “core skills”, which instead emphasizes their ubiquity and usefulness in both personal an professional life.
In STEM, soft skills development is essential for career development, as well summarized by Mehmet Fidanboylu, software engineer from Google, answering the “What is the saddest part of being a programmer?” question on Quora:
As I hit 40, I also hit a career ceiling. I enjoy what I do and it has gotten me far but no-one really cares about good code as long as it does the job.
I cannot grow in my current role unless I take on more leadership; something I am not interested in doing. So my peers, who would rather have meetings than write code, are now directors and VPs leaving me in the dust in terms of both compensation and influence.
Soft skills are already very relevant in my current work - as a data & business analysis, I am often an interface between “the business” and software developers. And I know that my desired and most realistic future career path options - climbing the corporate ladder, freelance consulting, founding a startup, investment - will require even more advanced and proficient soft skills. Same applies in case I ever decide to quit my STEM day job and try to capitalize on my hobbies such as music or Substack writing.
Humanities, the science of human nature, provides much needed context for learning soft skills. Some of the most helpful and influential books I read in recent years such as Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow and Harvey Karp’s The Happiest Baby on the Block could be easily summarized into a list of bullet points that could possibly fit on one screen. But as I realized, the books give you the full experience, a glimpse into the author’s mind and allow you to truly understand and internalize the message. In business speak, the bullet point summary only provides the What, while the book also provides the Who, Why, Where, When and How.
The Saga Continues
On a personal level, my current quest to become a humanist is actually a third episode of a long-running saga of my personal and social development efforts.
The first episode was me trying to close the gap in social development and catch up with my peers in primary school. I did not attend preschool or kindergarten, and my parents provided me very little opportunities to meet, play and relate with other kids in my early childhood. As a nerdy, socially awkward kid, I obviously struggled to fit in. Luckily, I managed to avoid heavy bullying, but still experienced a lot of the less-but-still-quite painful social rejection. Eventually, after lots of trials and errors, I started figuring things out and got better over time.
The second episode was me dealing with the aftermath of the previous stage, the typical high-IQ-low-EQ nerdy kid problem: teenage inceldom. As a young adult, I learned the ways of the Pick Up Artists, or PUAs. To make a long story short: I started going out, talking to girls, dating and, again, catching up on the experiences I missed out on before. A little over a year into my PUA journey, I met a girl I instantly found truly exceptional and decided to go all in - we are happily married today, and hopefully for many more years to come.
The PUA period was my first conscious application of (some sort of) humanities - psychology and social dynamics - for self-improvement, and it truly changed my life.
The third episode started over a year ago. As an early 30s man, I realized I was soon about to tick all the boxes within the standard middle class curriculum: good job, a wife, a child, a house, a car - the modern equivalent of the fairy tale “living happily ever after”. For me, it felt more like finishing an an open world game: with the main storyline complete and all extra achievements unlocked, the initial feeling of excitement and accomplishment quickly wanes. You can wander and mess around a bit, but eventually you will either restart the game on hard mode, or just quit and pick up another game.
I noticed that I have drifted away from my early adulthood friends and failed to make any new ones over the years - as I later found out, a typical 30s experience described by Anne Helen Petersen as The Friendship Dip. For me, it was additionally driven by my persisting autistic tendencies (watching Good Doctor with my wife typically leads to more than one “You are just like him!” conversation per episode).
I also read about the horseshoe effects of social relationships vs social class, and decided that in order to be able to further level up in life, I have to put in conscious effort to up my social skills game once again. As Richard Hanania pointed out, a high-functioning autist can, instead of forcing him/herself to be “normal”, beat the normies at their own game by studying and applying psychology and social dynamics in everyday life. I’ve already done it before in my PUA period, and I was ready to do it again in a slightly different context.
During the past year I managed to:
Increase my book reading throughput 2x, still far from my desired level though. Planning to cut down on reading Substacks to have more time for books.
Start the Polish version of this newsletter, learn and get into a habit of writing and got a modest readership, roughly equivalent of the amount of people in my extended social network multiplied by the fraction of people possibly interested in reading longform essays online.
Cut down on social media use (with great help from Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism - I highly recommend).
Put more effort in supporting the relationships with my friends & getting new ones - with some improvement, but also not as much as I expected.
Starting an international edition of this newsletter is a next step of the journey. Poland is culturally lagging in adoption of the blogging/newsletter renaissance brought by Medium, Substack and other emergent platforms, with quickest adoption in the internationally oriented tech & business community. Bartek Pucek, one of the few prominent Substackers from Poland, has notably decided to switch his popular tech/business Substack to English recently.
As I am not planning to write about tech or business, I consider my options for growing readership of my Polish content limited and decided to see if there are any readers possibly interested in my writing in other corners of the world.
Trans Humanists are (not) Humanists
Many humanities degree holders defy the humanist loser stereotype and manage to achieve successful careers in HR, media, marketing, advertisement, consulting, as specialists, leaders and entrepreneurs.
Kamil Stanuch, a Literature and Sociology graduate, went on to become a successful IT startup builder, manager and consultant. He is also running two newsletters: a personal one (in Polish) with notes and essays about business, economy and culture and the daily Briefdose newsletter with bullet point news summaries:
Kamil’s journey from humanities to the world of IT and business provided him with diverse experience and knowledge, effectively making him a modern equivalent of the Renaissance Man - an intellectual capable of truly unique writing.
Seeing someone I have known personally achieve such status made it seem attainable for me. However, I knew my journey would be quite different, as I was about to start it from the opposite end of the STEM-humanities spectrum. That’s how the idea of the humanist transition was born.
The Trans Humanist is a play on transhumanism, but also on transsexualism. A Trans Humanist is a humanist mind trapped inside a STEM… mind (?), an intellectually nonconforming individual who explores his/her hidden inner side, and then possibly comes out of the closet.
The humanist transition can happen in multiple ways:
Some transsexual people opt for a complete surgical and hormonal transition. Trans Humanists can transition fully by getting a formal education and/or a full time job as a writer or scholar.
Cross-dressers wear gender-nonconforming clothing and makeup to feel and present as opposite sex without significantly altering their physical bodies. For a Trans Humanist, the light transition option is keeping your safe and well paid STEM day job while moonlighting as a humanist.
The transsexual spectrum also includes people who are androgynous, non-binary and genderfluid. Similarly, a Trans Humanist can also decide to concurrently develop in both STEM and humanities to place him/herself in the middle of the STEM-humanities spectrum, or fluctuate between STEM and humanist orientation whenever they please.
Finally, there is the debate about putting gender nonconforming teenagers on puberty blockers. Similarly, young nerdy people pushed into STEM by their families and basically the rest of the society should be allowed to put their STEM development on hold and explore their humanist side in order to make better life and education choices further down the road.
As a conservative, I don’t support full appropriation of transsexualism such as “Trans women are women”. In fact, I think it is against the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion agenda driven by the liberal establishment: forcing people into established gender roles is one of the things the liberals apparently hate. Instead, the purpose of DEI should be to acknowledge and celebrate how people all over the trans spectrum are different from the cisgender, and to emphasize the richness of their unique experience of walking between the two worlds.
I see a similar need to embrace how Trans Humanists can bring out the best of both worlds. There are numerous examples of successful Trans Humanists: public intellectuals with STEM background, known for producing thought provoking and even mind boggling humanist writing: Cal Newport, Marc Andreessen, Raymond Kurzweil, Eliezer Yudkovski and many other members of the AI researchers club. Many of the more low key authors and commenters in the rationalist, EA and e/acc online communities are also high IQ people with STEM background and therefore also Trans Humanists.
The Humanistic Reawakening
Ted Gioia from The Honest Broker connected the crisis of humanities in academia with disruption of society related to proliferation of modern technology, I highly recommend to read the entire piece:
The key part of Ted’s essay is the notion of a grassroots humanist reawakening movement happening outside of academia both online and offline, and his humanist manifesto:
Here are eight imperatives—all of them drawing strength and sustenance from the humanities:
We need a way of defining and pursuing progress that doesn’t reduce that concept to something that only comes from a digital device.
We desperately need access to values and wisdom that aren’t corrupted by the relentless financial metrics and imposed flavor-of-the-month narratives of the current moment.
We need to instill a respect for human beings, whose physical and psychic health should come ahead of the accelerated scalability of corporate bots.
We need to address the growing human crisis—witnessed by a frightening increase in mental illness, cases of depression, suicidal tendencies, etc.—with a human response, instead of ramping up the tech that is demonstrably adding to these problems.
We need to provide the young, who are especially vulnerable to these dysfunctional technologies, with some bedrock of values and practices that will nurture their potential as human beings, not captured tech clients.
We need to learn from the past, and the thousands of years of accumulated wisdom it can provide—something that is only accessible via the humanities.
We need to preserve and celebrate core human values in the face of metrics that want to reduce every initiative, every decision to optimization of the numbers.
We need to propagate a compassionate, humanistic worldview, not a private equity mindset in which every human activity is squeezed to maximize cash flow and support the luxury lifestyles of the technocracy.
Only the humanities can deliver these essential things. And go ahead and mock me, but I’m not exaggerating when I say that this is becoming a matter of life or death.
As a Trans Humanist, I fully support Ted’s message. I think the issues that Ted described are rooted in many years of culture and economy pulling smart young people away from humanities and into STEM. Too much was done to create an overabundance of and overreliance on technology, and too little to mitigate the adverse effects of its disruptive effects on the society. Many STEM people could benefit the society more by using their high IQ minds to contribute to solve the developed world’s most pressing problems, which are no longer the technology problems, but rather humanist problems CAUSED by technology. The humanist transition is the way.
To summarize, there are numerous reasons to consider becoming a Trans Humanist if you are a STEM person: to become more complete, help with soft skills and career growth, improve social relationships and the dating & mating game, break through the middle-class glass ceiling, get an unique perspective, publish great writing and, ultimately, help make the world a better place.
I hope this message reaches people like me, who can fully benefit from the humanist transition: smart, ambitious, slightly autistic nerds, who are already on top of things, but would still like to grow and contribute in new ways.
Everyone else is also welcome to tag along and enjoy the unique and (hopefully) interesting insights developed inside my Trans Humanist mind (and 0% ChatGPT).
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