Deeper mathematics is meaningful to me for its beauty and the way it feels like arriving at some fundamental truth, for whatever value that can exist. Similar for deeper physics, it's very appealing to me to try to understand the world on some fundamental level, as much as we're capable. And I find it very satisfying solving a good math problem just on the cusp of my limits.

Then higher up the chain is chemistry, electronics, robotics, software. I love seeing how we can put these things together for practical or just fun purposes, and I love when I put something together and get to see the end result working and doing something fun or useful. Doing the little lab experiments in my physics classes in college, it was really cool seeing the math on paper describe what was going on right in front of me, that I made predictions for. Something more practical to put my skills to use a while ago was the light setup I made with turn signals and some other safety features with an Arduino for my ebike. Admittedly I also enjoy when someone sees what I did and appreciates it but I also do it for myself. Then there's AI which brings up all kinds of philosophical questions.

And on another plane I'm getting into the things that go along with homesteading like plant science and animal husbandry. Home grown food tastes better and it's another thing I just think is cool/fun.

This all comes from some combination of appreciation, awe, fun, practicality, or just finding things cool - not seeking validation or running away from something. But I can still heavily sympathize with wishing I had a hundred lives to live, or got to live a thousand years in some kind of university, so I could fully appreciate all of these things. Right now I'm getting out of a long depressive slump and feeling like I've wasted too much time letting myself go intellectually, and wishing I'd dived even deeper on some of them in the past, but I'm feeling good about the future now.

Whether it is rarefied academic pursuits, music and arts appreciation, friendships, love, delicious food, sex, or ... we have to decline a world of countless possibilities to engage what is in front of us. And even then, we need rest periods in order to fully appreciate those rare few branches we do take. You can't enjoy or pursue anything 24x7. The nature of our experience is inexorably tied to the exclusion of other non-experiences.

In other words, life is a constant stream of decisions and branching points. The underlying angst of "not enough lifetime" is rooted, I think, in grief for these other paths not taken, for the loss of imagined alternatives. This is supported by the delusional idea that we could defer and return to every branch (given enough time). It ignores the ephemeral and limited nature of most opportunities and potential experiences, the necessity of closing one door to open another, and that most doors are never open to us (individually) to begin with.

You wouldn't just need a hundred lives or a thousand years but some kind of combinatoric explosion of a Multiverse You, where you could explore every choice of collapsing decision point. But what does that even mean? I think it's another delusion about identity and the self to think that "you" can experience the different paths. You'd be many someones else. If you could somehow fuse them together into an experience, you've just added some kind of sci-fi "hive mind" to your experience. But wouldn't you wish you could have experienced those things as an individual...?

To get stuck with this frustration is a failure to mourn. A failure to accept a finite life and get on with it. That leaves the grief stuck in the back of the mind. This is where philosophers of mind might tell you about desires as the source of suffering, etc. Where practitioners might propose moderation or the so-called middle path. Where the CBT folks might say you are on the path so you might as well learn to enjoy it, and offer a grab bag of tricks to help achieve that.

Acquiring expertise is like climbing a mountain. There are revelations in the process, and it is like reaching a beautiful vista and the joy of seeing things expansively, from a height.

I wish I could have this experience in other domains, and feel the constraint is just the physical and temporal bounds of life.

Still, I recognize it as a fantasy to want these things. It’s just simply not possible.

I also recognize that there is something to the Eastern ideas of awareness and consciousness and that you perhaps you don’t need to labor toward material expertise to experience life with expansive revelation?

While you may not be an expert in all of the fields you can definitely understand the basic rules that govern all of these things and build upon that. Mathematics describes all of it

Without some kind of urge we could be happy doing nothing, coasting on what the previous generation did until our society collapse.

“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”

― G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain

People do stuff and then they die, so try to have fun, do stuff that you want to do and don't worry so much about what mysterious voodoo motivates what you do, who cares?

If you make 10 people's lives better throughout your life, and you did that because of some childhood trauma that motivates you to be a savior or to get approval, who gives a shit? You still helped them.

It’s amazing the cheap cop outs people settle for faced with failure at the most superficial level. The anxiety and fear of failure ties them up and eventually they give in having earned nothing from toiling and suffering as much or more than their successful peers. Ending jealous for the utmost irony.

If only you could sit down and focus and complete one thing.

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.

As a bit of context, I have been applying for work for about a year now as a software developer in the DACH (german-speaking EU), to be able to eke out a proper living and so far, every job inquiry, every human contact I have made boils down to "me not being good enough" in some respect. Even though I am sure to perform well, given standard compensation and a reasonable work environment.

Everything starting from my education, my life, to my work experience has come under scrutiny and has become more fragmented and harder to coagulate as a coherent story as a result of this constant requirement for me needing "higher expertise to qualify".

Over the course of my life, I have encountered hundreds of situations where as a result of my own lack of expertise in some domain, I was oblivious and even sometimes happy to accept completely unacceptable results, bad products/workmanship or horrible relationships. As a result of bad experiences thereafter, I found myself studying how to manage things on my own, as consistently endangering my very own life didn't appeal to me.

So I feel myself pressured into studying more JS frameworks, more foreign languages, more programming languages, more engineering, more medicine, more chemistry, more psychology, more design science, more product science, more construction science, more everything until I achieve a level of reliable expertise.

At the same time, I am painfully aware of the fact that on my deathbed I will heavily resent the fact I had to spend all this time on personal expertise when probably "we could have had nice things" instead. To be honest, I feel resentment over the fact right now.

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.

My instinct is to go learn more, make another project, stall it out and come back when I'm better prepared. I can't really see what one more project is going to do for me though.

What feedback are you getting? Is it ghosting that you're interpreting as not being good enough?

The real key for me now is feeling that I am enough just as I am. I still strive in my career and in a few hobbies, that's still important, but I try hard not to identify too much with them. I fail quite often but it's liberating. I try to frame my passions as things with intrinsic rewards and not things that bolster my ego.