Interdisciplinarity sounds glamorous. It suggests breadth, hybrid competence, and outsized future potential. Yet in practice, people who work across disciplines often live with a quieter, persistent anxiety: they have learned a little of many things, but hesitate to claim they truly know any one thing. 

This anxiety often grows out of a common strength. Interdisciplinary researchers tend to learn fast, transfer skills well, and feel less intimidated by unfamiliar fields. That can create a seductive illusion: if they keep studying, one day everything will “come together,” and they will be able to operate freely across multiple domains. But modern disciplines are not built to support that fantasy. Each mature field has its own language, tools, and standards of evaluation. Entering a new discipline typically requires not a few extra courses, but a deep enculturation into an entire system. The most common mistake is to confuse “having touched multiple fields” with “being able to move expertly within multiple fields.” 

A key reality is often missed here: interdisciplinary work is not limitless horizontal expansion—it is vertical refocusing. The most effective intersections happen in narrow boundary zones: a clearly defined problem calls for a small set of crucial tools, which are then anchored in a concrete, stable research or engineering context. Without that constraint, “interdisciplinarity” quickly deteriorates into being broad but shallow. 

In practice, the center of gravity should not be the person becoming an expert in every adjacent discipline, but the person repeatedly answering a highly specific class of questions. When the problem is clear, it becomes easier to decide what must be mastered deeply and what only needs to be understood well enough to support sound judgment. When the problem is vague, learning expands without limit—and the mind is left with a constant unease: Should I learn more? Am I missing something essential? 

This also explains why interdisciplinary people are especially vulnerable to self-doubt. They are exposed to multiple evaluation systems at once. Compared with specialists in one area, their work can seem “not pure enough,” “not elegant enough,” or “too idealized,” depending on who is looking. Over time, this can become structural: if one does not fully belong to any single discipline, how does one describe who they are? The fantasy of becoming a “polymath” often functions as psychological compensation for that identity uncertainty—as if only by knowing everything can one justify staying on that path. 

But the fantasy does not hold up. The real danger is not “being insufficiently capable,” but being pulled around by disciplinary labels. Instead of defining oneself by disciplines, it is more stable to define oneself by problems. Disciplines are human partitions; problems are real constraints in the world. Once the recurring problem-class is named, boundaries become clearer: what to learn deeply, what to learn partially, and what to ignore. 

Equally important is accepting an incomplete professional identity. Interdisciplinary workers are rarely captured well by a standard label. That is not a deficiency; it is the cost of the choice. The goal is not to be recognized as an expert in every relevant field. The goal is to be reliable—provably useful—on a specific class of problems, in ways collaborators and peers can trust. Professional identity should come from the models built, the explanations that hold, and the decisions that consistently work, not from a résumé that looks broad but fails any discipline’s deepest interrogation. 

Learning, in this view, must be repositioned. Learning is not the goal; it is an instrument. It is used to build a framework that can be computed, tested, and improved; to identify key mechanisms rather than accumulate “coverage.” When learning turns into performance or collecting knowledge for its own sake, interdisciplinarity degrades into perpetual lateral drift—motion that feels productive but does not advance capability. Mature interdisciplinary work often looks like the opposite: the learning scope narrows over time, while problem-solving power concentrates and gains penetration. 

The endpoint of interdisciplinarity is not “being a polymath.” In a highly specialized knowledge system, polymathy is no longer a practical option; it is mostly a comforting myth. The value of interdisciplinarity lies elsewhere: building distinctive connections at a few critical junctions and converting them into understanding and dependable solutions. The task is not to know everything, but to integrate the right tools and make reliable judgments in specific contexts. That is already difficult—and already rare.