pantsfarm

Sometimes I wonder if it really has all been done before.

Ok, that’s not really true, I don’t wonder if everything has already been done, but I do wonder if I will ever do something really original.

I feel like I’ve never really created anything, never come up with something new. I’ve spent my entire life learning about things other people have done, probably better than I have or ever will, and then mimicking them, in an effort to demonstrate my own competency at whatever it is I am doing.

Sometimes, I might have some relative expertise, because I read a little bit more than the people around me, and so I’ll be able to use this slight knowledge advantage to do something apparently clever, but I feel like these are none to impressive because I figure it’s just a matter of time before they do catch up and ultimately outpace me in whatever it is we’re doing.

It’s easy to go around, making minor corrections to everything, but I feel like it’s so much harder to do something novel, something really new and interesting.

This seems like such a stupid thing for me to worry about, that I’m never going to think of something really novel, something new, something… else.

I feel like I’ve got no mastery of anything, I’m just sort of okay at a lot of different things, and maybe nobody else has the same combination of middling expertise in their skill set that I do, but it doesn’t matter because instead they have some focus, some area that they really are good at, and so they can do interesting things in that one thing.

Is it a skill to simply go around from topic to topic and struggle to justify the constant change of interests by desperately looking for the parallels and connections between these seemingly disparate fields? I feel like even in that I rarely succeed and so instead I just have these vast stores of knowledge, each part unrelated to the rest, having never really found something I cared so deeply about that I could stop jumping to the next as it randomly came along.

I know at this point I am rambling, and so I am going to stop. I guess I could summarize this whole thing to a couple core concerns: Is there anything I can really call an area of my expertise? Is there anything else left out there that I could ever really become truly expert at?

To these, the answer is hopefully obviously a resounding yes, and I hope that even so long as I fail to see it, other people will continue to.