Speaking with Authoritativeness

I often wonder when I will be able to speak with assurance and authoritativeness about my subject area. Something I have noticed over the past few weeks is the high degree of authority with which some young people speak on Twitter. There is nothing original or enlightening about most of the takes, but that is besides the point. Their confidence is what I find fascinating. Most of them are just a few years out of PhD programmes and some of them don't even have a PhD. I am that stage of my PhD where I feel like the little I could say with confidence is so obvvious that its better to keep mum. In the first eyar of my PhD, I was brimming with confidence. I would be an active participant in conferences and workshops, and gae no thought to the possibility that I was asking stupid questions or giving stupid answers. Around the second year, my confidence started to flag, when I realised how little I knew. I am in my final year now, and although I know more, I feel like I have nothing new or original to offer. A PhD is essentially an exercise marking your intellectual territory and building an intellectual edifice for your subsequent efforts. You may chose to move from that territory, but that is easier than marking your territory for the first time. Maybe I will be able to speak with confidence when I have a territory marked and an edifice in place.