Big Imposter Syndrome [long post sorry]

Hi everyone,

Originally wanted to post in off topic but just made an account

Here's a bit of background context before I get into my main query:

In school I was interested in finance early on, but did not do too well with extracurricular recruiting and early internship recruiting. As a result, I had almost given up on finance as a career path and begun looking elsewhere. However, I got a great opportunity and I believe very lucky in my current job.

I'm a very recent grad (m21) working at a private equity firm. I genuinely love my job; I like what we do, I like listening to the seniors talk about investment strategy and rationale, I like hearing external and internal pitches about investment opportunities and understanding the philosophy behind these investments. I like working in excel but even for ad hoc and menial tasks, I take pride in completing them as I can tell my superiors appreciate me. My work culture is extremely positive; everyone is very nice and understanding and treats me well and with patience, there is no office politics and everyone always cracks jokes with each other, including our most senior mds. From what I heard, everyone is generally very satisfied with my work and I believe I am likely to be promoted on pace.

My problem is I feel like an imposter in finance. I came from a business undergraduate background and during recruiting I did study and ramp myself on the necessary fundamentals such as valuation, modeling, accounting etc. As a result, I don't think I'm a complete idiot, and I also believe I am a quick learner and somewhat competent, so I have been doing alright with novel tasks or concepts. However, when I talk to my friends and peers in finance, I feel like I am overwhelmingly behind them in knowledge. They always talk about events on the street, movements between notable firms, world events and its financial implications (generally focused around public equities and industry groups, sometimes specific shops and team activity), and investment philosophy and strategy. I know some of these friends regularly listen to financial podcasts and read investment books genuinely out of interest, and keep up to date on like finance twitter and forums for everyday events. I usually am very lost in these discussions and just passively listen; I don't even really most of the other posts here on WSO and have very little sense of the reputations of the big names and industry norms.

Me on the other hand, I could not be asked to look into additional finance stuff in my free time. Not to sound pretentious, but when I do learn stuff on my own for fun, I generally enjoy stem (mostly medical-related topics) and arts (classical music topics, and essays/critical analysis about film/shows). I could easily spend a couple of hours learning about these topics while feeling engaged and entertained.

Not to sound like a bitch, but I believe my aversion to finance stems from anxiety of feeling overwhelmingly behind and that others will realize I know nothing. I do genuinely like my job and am interested in the work I do, but I was wondering if anyone had any advice on how I could become more organically interested in finance. The only learning I could do was always directly relevant to recruiting, but I feel like if I want to continue in this industry, I should generally be up to date on financial events and background knowledge and continually learn about it on a regular basis. Thank you all.