I feel you. As a child, I always wanted to become a polymath. A true Renaissance man. I was always curious about many different fields and read obsessively about philosophy, math, physics, history and much more. I graduated best in my entire province and hoped for broadening my horizon at university. Now I’m writing my Master thesis in Mathematical physics and feel like this hyper specific research area is consuming every waking hour of my life. And despite that, I know that I will never achieve mastery in even this narrow field. Neither will I innovate because I’m not creative enough and my mind is inclined towards a broad knowledge base, not a deep one. Sadly, this kind of person is no longer appreciated in our society. I feel like academia today is geared towards producing highly specialized experts in a narrow field, so that they can later function as just another cog in our soulless consumerist society, increasing the profits of our cooperatist overlords. Even among my fellow students there are so many just in it for the money and/or the social prestige. The rest are “Fachidioten”, with no interest in any other field. Where has the ideal of acquiring knowledge for its own sake gone? I become more and more nihilistic by the day. It’s depressing.
