I get most of my news online these days; I have a subscription service that gives me access to all sorts of publications and articles and the world being what it is the service presumes to know what I want to read so I see particular categories with some regularity. My service knows that I like the national news and politics, state, and local, and it knows that I like food, health, nutrition, the occasional celebrity gossip, a little travel; all in all pretty basic stuff. Once you get past the first few scrolls of the national headlines you get into the other stuff and of course depending on what I clicked on most recently the order of my interests adjusts. I don’t love that but the world is what it is so I adjust, I scroll, I search and it mostly works out.

But here’s the thing that I have been noticing that has caught my interest more so than the content itself: after the national headlines, after the state and local updates, everything (not really everything but it feel like almost everything) is written by an “expert.” Now this is just what the dictionary says but according to that esteemed tome an expert is someone, “who has a comprehensive and authoritative knowledge of or skill in a particular area.” If you try to read just about anything that has to do with anything about how to be healthy, happy, fulfilled, active, whatever you can be pretty sure it was written by an “expert” these days and I wonder really if all of the people who are writing these things really have comprehensive and authoritative knowledge. That’s a pretty high bar and while I don’t want to take anything away from someone who has worked hard in their chosen field I just feel a little concerned about the authority with which something might be said and whether or not it’s really as comprehensive as it should be.

I have a lot of opinions about things, and a lot of wisdom from the grannies and the aunties who raised me. I have three decades of work experience and a collection of letters that I can add after my name, but I don’t think I’m an expert in anything. I know some stuff and one of the things I know is that there is a lot I don’t know. I’m grateful for the education I have received because it has taught me to make presumptions and engage in some logical calculation based on what I have learned and experienced, and it has taught me to question the certainty that I bring to my answers.

And with all the work I have done, all the decisions I have had to make, the people who have been impacted by choices I’ve made, and the lessons I have learned in all of it I would not say I’m an expert. This is not false humility it is just a fact. I have done some things, some things I have done a lot of, some other things I have studied deeply but I am not an authority and I most definitely do not have comprehensive knowledge of anything. Maybe other people do. I am sure that a few people do. But I am worried that too many people claim expertise a little too soon and then if or when that advice doesn’t work out the system of reliance and trust on what expertise should be falls apart.

This sounds critical and I really don’t mean it to be; and yet I worry, truly, about the fifteen articles I just scrolled through that say “I am a nutrition expert,” “I am a parenting expert,” “I am an exercise expert,” “I am a flying expert,” and so on and really it is just a perspective from someone who has a good or bad idea based on work they have done for a few years, or not at all. I think, and I’m no expert here, that we need fewer people who are certain they are right, and more people who wonder, who are curious, who know how to reason logically and learn from where they have been, who want to share their experience knowing it is a perspective not a formula, who just want to listen to you and maybe share something if it is helpful. I will never be an expert in anything, there is just too much to learn.