The people who seem to know everything just started reading a long time before you met them.

That impression is usually a head start you did not see. Somebody who can talk about anything has been reading for ten or twenty years, a bit at a time, and you are meeting the accumulated result rather than the process. None of it arrived at once. The gap is made of hours, and you have hours.

Start the accumulation now rather than waiting for a free year. Twenty minutes a day on things that genuinely interest you compounds in a way that is invisible for a year and obvious in five. Keep it unsystematic, since that is how most people you admire did it.