You’ve probably heard people talk about the dangers of being “a mile wide and an inch deep.” It’s that idea that if you spread yourself across too many things, you never really master anything. And sure, that makes sense in some ways. But I think we don’t talk enough about the other side of it, how true depth often requires breadth.

For example, in science, nothing really exists in isolation. If you go deep into biology, you eventually start running into chemistry. Then chemistry leads into physics, and before you know it, you’re asking questions that spill over into psychology or even philosophy.

Without that kind of big-picture awareness, it’s easy to develop blind spots. You can end up feeling like you “know” a topic, but your understanding stays kind of narrow. Like knowing all the biochemistry of a hormone but not thinking about how it affects someone’s behaviour, or how social context plays a role in that too.

One example where I’ve seen this come up is with public debates around gender. Sometimes people bring in biology as if it’s the only thing that matters, like it can settle everything. But gender is way more complicated than just biology. It involves psychology, sociology, history, and culture too. If we only focus on one angle, we miss the bigger picture.

So maybe “breadth vs. depth” isn’t the right way to frame it. The deeper I try to go, the more I realize that everything’s connected. And that’s what makes learning so endlessly interesting.