Aging & Wisdom Quote by Dennis Flanagan

Flanagan is needling a modern badge of honor: the narrowly minted expert who can do one thing brilliantly and calls that a life. As an editor, he’s speaking from a profession built on the opposite impulse. Editing is synthetic work; it lives in the seams between disciplines, translating one specialized language into another, noticing patterns a single field can’t see from inside its own walls. So when he says people are "proud", there’s a gentle sting: pride becomes a kind of self-congratulation that lets you stop looking.

The line works because it flips the usual moral hierarchy. Specialization is typically framed as seriousness, competence, adulthood. Flanagan treats it as a potential impoverishment, not of skill but of sensibility. The subtext is that expertise can turn into a lifestyle of controlled inputs: the same colleagues, the same problems, the same metrics for "well". You become legible to institutions and employable to markets, while becoming less surprised by the world.

Context matters. Coming from an editor, this isn’t anti-knowledge romanticism; it’s a warning about monoculture. In the age of specialization (read: bureaucracies, professional credentialing, hyper-optimized careers), breadth starts to look like dabbling. Flanagan rebrands it as living. The final clause, "missing out on much else life has to offer", is deliberately unspecific because he’s not prescribing a syllabus. He’s pointing at everything that doesn’t fit on a resume: curiosity, aesthetic pleasure, civic literacy, the ability to connect dots before they become headlines.