The path to enlightenment is staying on the left tail

The market is intimidating but brutally honest, so many are afraid to enter finding all kinds of excuses crutches or rabbit holes to hide down instead of facing potential rejection, because of this they never learn how to recover from failure. You could argue from an outside perspective this is the purpose of modern academia for individuals*, it is a supplier of apparent safety, convenient rabbit holes, eventually trapping those who cannot face market forces or forget to come up for air. institutionalized inaction. *(Collectively the purpose of modern academia is to tell the state what it wants to hear.)

With time, it becomes intellectual masturbation.

Completly agree. It’s a ‘too much of a good thing’ scenario

Philosophy can't be forced.

Cuz time is finite. Trade-offs. Learn/Live. Do both at the same time as much as possible. LFG!

TLDR: Only study philosophy until you find yourself sniffing your own farts. View quoted note →

I loved "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" up 'til the point where the guy reached his ultimate state and was free-flow urinating himself in bed. Kind of lost me there.

There are those that say, the problem with philosophy is that it has become the destruction of meaning rather than the illumination of it

the curve flattens as IQ decreases

Beyond a point, philosophical study can lead to analysis paralysis, hindering practical application of knowledge, such as implementing secure multi-party computation for private AI inference.

the negative tail is real. past a point frameworks stop sharpening your decisions and start substituting for them. there's always one more thinker to defer to. the people who got the most from philosophy seem to be the ones who eventually left it.

I stink. Therefore, I am.

True. I used to read lots of books on economics, philosophy and religion. Now I prefer novels and poetry.

I think many get caught up in the words & the thinking too much. Eventually you reach a point where you need to start embodying the truths uncovered. You have to put theory into practice. This embodying process can be very humbling & even humiliating. It's often where a lot of false entities get disgarded & the person discovers they've been living a lie. From the outside the person is in turmoil & it appears as if they're life is going down the toilet. When their physical reality stabilises, they will usually reflect on that period without regret even though it completely changed their physical experience. They left their job, lost their house & family but they still maintain their life is more peaceful for it. The ones who appear to benefit from philosophy are often the ones who just adopt a less limited view of reality. They expanded their perspective but not to the point where they experienced the death of who they thought they were. What really messes people up is when they feel the need to convince others of their new perspective. That's an express ticket to a padded cell, if you're not careful. I'm not saying that everyone needs to throw out everything that they think is important, to benefit from philosophy. I'm saying that there are many perspectives & subjective ways to assess someone's trajectory. I think how often they are present, in the here & now is a pretty good indicator.