Ask HN: I want to be an expert in many things but my lifetime won't be enough

That's really the more pressing issues that you need to work on.

We all have blind spots about how things or people work, and we're all in a condition where "good enough" is almost always "good enough."

If it helps, the slow process of remaining curious and caring about the people and work you encounter that will build expertise, and that's a thing that takes decades to show itself.

And while we can do many things quite expertly in life, we can only do a few of these at a time.

What you might understand is that, to take just one domain, people looking to hire programmers are looking for is someone who knows about a certain domain, so anything that you're doing outside of whatever narrow field you're discussing with a single person doesn't really matter as far as many people are concerned. T0 the person hiring a junior JS front-end developer, the chemistry skills isn't often relevant.

Further, there is very little learning that a person can do outside of a job. That is a problem, but the way I personally solved it was to lower my expectations for jobs until I got one, and then keep looking for new ones until I found a position I have been quite happy in.

However, all that is outside of the problem you are describing: simply being a person is enough to make you "fit for life".

You don't need to be consistently grinding on learning new things if that's not an end-in-itself for you.

Simply being good enough at one or two things is what almost all of us have to be okay with, and so what you might consider is which specific issues leading you to feeling this resentment.

Are your expectations unreasonable? Are the people you're dealing with assholes?

I suspect that answer to either or both of those questions my be yes; the fortunate thing is that either of those are easier and more useful to deal with than, say, becoming an expert physicist.

For me personally they often have been and still are a much needed way to escape plus a conduit to a multitude of other interests and my professional career (not directly related).

OTOH and more often than I would like to admit these days its meaningless, consumerist time wasting at best and an addiction at worst.

Taking away from other things and relationships even.

Yet even with the same old games and principles and all the addictive aspects I’d still love it as a hobby (in low doses) but I’m probably also not the only one still fooling themselves that it’s more than that.

Maybe it’s time to finally move on again (feels very hard though).

I think OP will be happy with whatever they choose to do, as long as they choose it and being worried before making any choice prevents them from truly trying to do something.

If you think about it -- expertise isn't what makes a lifetime worth living. It's a sense that what you're doing has meaning: A meaningful life is what gives you that sense of "enough"-ness.

Meaning can unfold in different ways, but part of it is about being "in the moment" -- While you're learning music, you have to find meaning in that journey without wishing you were findign time for astronomy (or being frustrated that you're not actually Mozart).

I recommend the book "Why Smart People Hurt" which deals specifically with the challenges of smart people and finding meaning.