Karen Walrond. In Defense of Dabbling: The Brilliance of Being a Total Amateur. Broadleaf Books, 2025. $27.99. 211 pp.
I have lived a strange and wonderful life.
In some ways it has been quite normal. I had a warm Southern California childhood with happy memories of a loving family and playing in the park, long days spent at Disneyland and the beach and grandma’s house—or as my mother called it during summer break, “Grandma Camp.”
And yet this vanilla exterior hides a complex, flavorful filling that has been slowly injected over the course of my life. Soccer and basketball and figure skating and cheerleading; piano and cello and clarinet and beatboxing; Mandarin and watercolor painting and theology and plumbing; chiropterology (the study of bats—think winged mammal, not baseball) and philosophy and raising chickens and knitting; acting and gardening and writing and dancing.
You could say that I’ve been a bit of a dabbler. A chronic amateur.
This made Karen Walrond’s new book, In Defense of Dabbling: The Brilliance of Being a Total Amateur, of immediate interest to me. The American milieu has given rise to “workaholism” and “perfectionism” and “hustle culture,” against whose backdrop Walrond’s call to something different strikes a refreshingly radical tone. Drawing on the etymology of the word “amateur”—which denotes “lover” with the connotation of “a lover of something” or “doing something for pleasure or interest”—Walrond encourages her reader to let hobbies remain hobbies, to resist the cultural and market pressures that expect and reward making every hobby into a profitable hustle, to cast off the crushing weight of perfectionist tendencies, to counter the narrative that “the acquisition of money, power, and mastery is the only way to live a successful life.” She wants us to do things “simply for the joy of doing them,” for the love of the proverbial game.
Why is this a worthy goal? To what end is amateurism ordered? Walrond’s goal aligns with humanistic psychology: we should rid ourselves of all that would frustrate the attainment of self-actualization and transcendence. For Walrond, this can happen through sustained practices in which one has rejected the allure of expertise. Practicing amateurism is ultimately a form of wholistic self-care. But as much as I love this basic idea of doing things for their own sake and agree that this enriches one’s life, I am not satisfied with this justification, for reasons I will explain in due course. But first, an overview of the way of the amateur.
In order to delineate pressure-laden expertise from amateurism—which, as the book’s title indicates, is practiced by “dabbling” or “trying an activity for a short period”—Walrond spends the first chapter enumerating the “Seven Attributes of Intentional Amateurism.” They are curiosity, mindfulness, self-compassion, play, stretch zone, connection, and wonder and awe.
You’ll notice that together these sketch the shape not of a particular practice but of an internal disposition. Assembled well, these hedge in a space where amateurism can grow and bear its fruit while keeping out capitalist critters and the wild beast of perfectionism. Walrond spends the first chapter defining each of the Seven Attributes, then from the third to the penultimate chapter provides anecdotes that illustrate her journey of learning each one, before finally arriving at the pinnacle of psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: transcendence—or, as she explains it, “the evolution from our individual bests to our collective bests.”
Before diving into her Seven Attributes, Walrond takes the second chapter to do some framing to point a way forward. First of all, these Attributes must be internally habituated by practices. One must dabble. Dabble with what? Which practices? It’s left up to the reader, although she recommends looking in five places to find options: activities you loved as a child, those you would do if you were ten years younger or older, talents you wish you had, activities done on your most playful vacation, and the types of social media content you follow. From these veins can be mined the raw activity-materials for amateur praxis. And if that exercise isn’t helpful, in an appendix she gives a list of over two-hundred practices to help get the juices flowing. Secondly (and smartly, I think), she reminds us that bound up in this project of amateurism as self-care is our spirit—meaning, one’s chosen practices must carry in them the promise of metaphysical benefit if one dabbles aright. Finally, she anchors the possibility of thriving to rest and leisure, the context in which dabbling is meant to occur.
In the end, the author understands intentional amateurism to be an act of rebellion in line with Wendell Berry’s Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front: “…every day do something that doesn’t compute… Work for nothing.” She wants her reader to thrive, “detaching from perceptions, being expansive, [and] feeling connected to self and universe.”
The question remains: if we follow the path she has mapped out, will we arrive at the summit of transcendence? To quote the hobbit Merry Brandybuck, “I wouldn’t count on it.”
If my review section seemed short and rather lacking in substance, you understand my first gripe. There wasn’t much more for me to review. In fairness to the author, her book is meant as a work of practical guidance rather than a work of theory. And yet I couldn’t avoid disappointment when each of the chapters on the Seven Attributes merely supplied personal anecdotes and litanies of experts telling me what that Attribute would produce without deeper exploration of the dynamic interplay between mind, morals, body, and spirit. It felt very “Source: trust me bro.” Initially I thought that the definitions and descriptions of the Attributes in chapter one were summaries and further development would come with each Attribute’s respective chapter. Alas, my record of perfect predictions has been marred.
The fundamental problem with the book runs deeper than my disappointment, though: The solution it proposes can’t escape its own diagnosis, and this results in some rather serious contradictions. Let’s look again at Walrond’s main argument. She suggests that leisurely amateurism combats the twin ill effects of the chronic pursuit of expertise: the burnout of never-ending production on the one hand and psychologically suffocating perfectionism on the other. We will look at each part of the problem in turn.
The chronic pursuit of expertise—a high level of skill or knowledge in a particular area—is bad in Walrond’s view because it is pregnant with capitalist meaning and driven by perfectionist motivations. Or if “bad” is too strong, then at least “undesirable.” Is this always the case? Well… almost always. An exception? Being an intentional amateur. The very act of defining amateurism with criteria by which it is best accomplished invites the possibility of becoming an expert amateur. And the invitation is not left implied: She wants you to master this! She wrote a whole book on it! But if one is an expert, then, by definition, one is no longer an amateur. Amateurism, then, is defeated by the expertise it seeks to displace.
Reducing the human to no more than a producer is one outcome of expertise, we are warned. To say it another way, our human nature is put in service to outcomes. By taking up intentional amateurism and avoiding expertise, by engaging in practices simply for the love of doing them, do we thereby avoid becoming factories with feet?
Perhaps in a material or economic sense, sure, but there is an invisible outcome towards which Walrond points us from the beginning and it lies beyond the practices themselves: self-care, self-actualization, transcendence. These are not mere byproducts; they are the goal. By definition, then, one does not do these practices simply for the love of doing them (even if one happens to love doing them!). Rather, people instrumentalize the practices in order to produce some other desired end. So then, amateurism as an antidote for production doesn’t have legs.
Expertise has a mutually reinforcing relationship with perfectionism. Walrond quotes researcher Brené Brown who writes, “Perfectionism is the belief that if we live perfect, look perfect, and act perfect, we can minimize or avoid the pain of blame, judgment, and shame.” Blame, judgment, and shame all imply a social ecology in which what one does is viewed by others. The fuel of perfectionism is appearance.
Curiously, Walrond introduces a minor theme early in the text worth noting: “how to be interesting.” Whether she means to or not, she has replaced one kind of appearance with another; she has swapped perfection with interest, both of which depend on the value judgment of others. “Being interesting” is just “being perfect” by another name, and the pressure of “being perceived as” has not been removed. Amateurism once again fails to solve the core problem, and rather shows itself to be part of it.
Some of my other issues include: her squishy use of “spirituality” which is always in reference to therapeutic or psychological ideas; calling the enterprise “spiritual” but then putting distance between the practitioner and the “mystical or woo-woo”; calling God “She”; using Jesus’ Name as a phrase of exasperation; her desire to “lift the soul” but a failure to say to where or to whom it is being lifted; and her desire to “transform [hobbies] from being responsibilities that require our attention, to activities that energize us,” yet, paradoxically, speaking positively of paying attention at multiple points.
Despite Walrond’s longing to transcend beyond the forces that flatten us—a good and worthy goal—she can’t seem to escape the immanent frame. She sees the value in doing something for its own sake yet cannot help but instrumentalize it. Why?
In his essay Leisure: The Basis of Culture, Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper asks with annoyance, “Is there a sphere of human activity, one might even say of human existence, that does not need to be justified by inclusion in a five-year plan and its technical organization?” Walrond and Pieper share many of the same concerns (which we might collectively label “dehumanization”) and perhaps a starting point (that humans are defined by their productive activity) in common. Pieper would recognize in Walrond’s book a reaction to the very thing that repulsed him, what he calls “total work.” Total work is a “vast utilitarian process in which our needs are satisfied, and…tied to such an extent that the life of the working man is wholly consumed by it.”
Total work reduces our human existence, and therefore all our activity, to the useful, the productive, or what Byung-Chul Han, in his Vita Contemplativa, has likewise called the “in-order-to.” It’s not that work is wrong or bad. Quite the opposite! But there is more to our humanity than what we produce to supply common need. Hunting for food, for example, is different from an English country dance; the end of hunting is beyond itself, but the end of dancing is in itself. Hunting is useful; dancing is useless. Both are truly human. Total work logic expands the domain of use to cover that of the useless, thereby subjugating it to use. Leisure is bound within activity. Rest becomes impossible because even rest is a sort of work, and ultimately answers to it.
It seems to me that Walrond has been captured unawares by total work logic, resting “in order to,” which makes her ultimate aim unattainable. She intuits many of the right things but does not have a worldview that allows them to fruitfully cohere. In fact, Pieper predicted this impossibility when he asked whether Humanism is up to the task of combatting total work, concluding that no, it was not. Why? Because it is not rooted in divine worship. “Cut off from the worship of the divine, leisure becomes laziness and work inhuman.”
Walrond is anxious to avoid the accusation of laziness (when understood as “unproductive”) and the inhumanity of work, and sees dabbling as the means, aimed at self-care. And yet this is precisely why it won’t work: It binds rest iron-clad to the world of activity, impenetrable by the transcendent, whereas leisure instead comes as a gift from the divinity she gestures towards but never names—the God who made Sabbath for man and celebrates it with him.
A true amateur must first be a lover of God. From that well-ordered love alone can the brilliance of amateurism begin to shine forth.