Felicific calculus
(Jeremy Bentham is my homeboy - given that his auto-icon resides a few minutes from my workplace and I am tenuously associated with the Godless Institution he founded.)
Thinking further about geekery and dilettantism, and that the thing that unites them is pleasure, that they are undertaken for enjoyment.
And in the case of geekery this may well be considered to be 'wasting one's time' on things that are not srs bznz and may even be things that are low down on the hierarchy of Culturally Worthwhile Stuff.
And dilettantism may be not taking Culturally Worthwhile Stuff srsly enough but flitting around it like an idle butterfly (rather than an industrious bee gathering up honey for some purpose).
And I say the hell with it, what's wrong with enjoyment?
This is one of the things that bugs me about those Ought To lists of Topp Stuff. Okay, fair enough, it may be worthwhile to sample the suggestions, but there is no obligation to commit oneself to the long haul of reading/watching the 100 Best/Most Significant Books/Movies. I don't think anyone is getting anything out of a piece of creative work unless, at some level and in some way, they're enjoying it, rather than dutifully ploughing through it (says the woman who once ploughed through the whole 2 volumes of Das Kapital, which has left very slight impression indeed: though reading it in fits and starts on a commuter train may not be the best way to tackle it).
I will concede that we sometimes have to do things we do not enjoy, and that even things we do may involve some stages or processes which we don't particularly like.
But I still think that pleasure and enjoyment (of the things that do this for us, rather than the things we're told ought to be doing it for us) are really non-trivial, non-optional things.