Here are a couple quotes on being stretched thin.
From Bilbo Baggins in Lord of the Rings:
I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter, scraped over too much bread.
From David Wells in God in the Wasteland:
To stretch this far … modernity must necessarily be culturally thin. … It is a generic culture, this culture of the television age, of asphalt, advertising, uniformity, and waste. And those who feed on it, those who live by it, become generic people who also are thin, who stretch wide and belong to nowhere in particular.
It must be stretching, terribly stretching, to have so many books and points of view to have to spread yourself among to understand the world. How much simpler it would be to have one book, one perspective, and one people!
(And, yes, even after the prior century, there are still people who think that way.)
This kinda reminds me of “Jack of all trades, master of none”. If someone learns too many things at once, they’ll have a stretched knowledge but that will be thin in every different field.
I was reminded of this Guy Forsyth song.
Or as VeggieTales “Lord of the Beans” put it: “I feel stretched, like chocolate pudding scraped across too much ham.”