All Expertise Has an Expiration Date
Why decades of experience can become obsolete overnight
The weavers were experts with hands.
Skilled craftsmen, who’d spent lifetimes mastering their trade, watched automated looms arrive in the textile mills.
Machines made hands optional.
It arrived quiet and fast, a loom that asked for setup, not sweat.
The mills didn’t need masters anymore.
They needed operators. Not hands that could feel tension in thread. Hands that could set thread, load patterns, tune speed, ship on time.
The job changed.
Not stitches, but sequences. Not finesse, but orchestration. Not heritage, but delivery.
Machines eliminated the need for the very expertise these men had built their identities around.
The weavers weren’t the first. They won’t be the last.
I started noticing this pattern repeats: what makes you an expert in the old way makes you blind to the new way.
No profession’s MO is safe. No expertise off limits.
Louis Pasteur wasn’t a doctor.
He was a chemist who spent two years applying his chemistry to medical problems. Some physicians spent 20 years studying disease, building careers on miasma theory (poisonous air), publishing papers, treating patients. They knew medicine.
Pasteur proved germ theory anyway.
The medical establishment fought him for years. Then the paradigm flipped, and decades of expertise became obsolete overnight.
Every paradigm shift creates this brutal window.
A moment where 2 years of fresh perspective absolutely demolishes decades of “experience.”
The old guard doesn’t see it coming.
They never do.
Expertise expires.
Expertise calcifies. It hardens into dogma. It becomes a shield against the future rather than a lens for seeing it.
The more certain experts sound, the more fragile their position.
The more dismissive their tone, the closer they are to obsolescence.
I’m not disrespecting experience. I’m recognizing its half-life.
In stable times, experience compounds.
In revolutionary times, it becomes baggage.
And we are not in stable times. We are in the middle of multiple overlapping revolutions. The gatekeepers don’t realize they’re guarding empty castles.
The walls are already crumbling.
The moat is drying up.
And somewhere, someone with two years of fresh perspective is developing the knowledge and skills for what comes next.
So here’s the question:
Are you defending expertise that’s expiring, or building perspective that’s emerging?
That friction you feel when you push against people who’ve “been doing this for 20 years” is not proof you’re wrong. It might be proof you’re early.
All expertise has an expiration date.
The only question is whether you’ll be ready when that date arrives.