Some of the most formidable people I’ve ever met studied philosophy. Not formidable in the way tech people use the word. Formidable in the way that impressed me most as an undergraduate. They could follow an argument through seven layers of abstraction without losing the thread, spot a hidden premise from across the room, and take your position apart so cleanly you’d thank them for it.

Lollipop

I did a philosophy BA. Went in because of Ayer and Russell and Wittgenstein. The people who looked at what language was actually doing and noticed it wasn’t what everyone assumed. I loved it. The weekly essay cycle at KCL was the hardest and most alive I’ve ever felt intellectually. And somewhere along the way I noticed that the most brilliant people in the building were broke, anxious about the job market, and producing work that maybe twelve people would ever read.

Philosophy has a selection problem. It attracts exactly the kind of mind that would be most valuable almost anywhere else, then locks that mind in a room where the output is only legible to others in the same room. Papers cite papers. Debates reference debates. A friend once called it a self-licking lollipop. A system whose primary function is to sustain itself. That phrase has stayed with me for fifteen years because I’ve never found a better one.

This isn’t an anti-intellectual point. If you took the fifty sharpest philosophy PhD students in the UK and redeployed them into law, medicine, policy, technology — fields where analytical precision is worth real money — the value created would be staggering. Instead they’re competing for a handful of lectureships, writing about contextualism for journals behind paywalls, and quietly wondering whether they made a catastrophic error at twenty-three.

Once you’ve spent four or five years acquiring a toolkit that only works inside the academy, leaving feels like waste. Sunk cost. So the brightest people stay longest. They become the most invested, the most specialised, the most stuck. The system selects for exactly the people whose departure would matter most, then makes departure feel like failure.

I met people during my degree who were among the sharpest humans I’ve encountered anywhere, before or since. Several spun out without academic posts. Others got posts and now spend their time applying for grants to fund research that will be read by the reviewers who are applying for the same grants. Philosophy — the discipline supposedly devoted to examining assumptions — almost never examines this one. That the work justifies itself. That the life of the mind is its own reward. That rigour deployed on sufficiently abstract problems is inherently valuable regardless of whether anyone outside the faculty ever benefits.

Wittgenstein built the ladder and told everyone to throw it away. Then he left. The discipline that remains is naturally filtered for people who either missed the point or disagreed with it. A kind of selection effect — those who took the exit aren’t around to shape what stayed behind. I think about that a lot. Go in, learn to think with a precision you can’t get anywhere else, and then leave and apply it to something that kicks back into the world. That might be the most honest version of a philosophy career. But almost nobody does it because the ladder is comfortable and the view is nice and nobody outside can tell you’re not going anywhere.

I didn’t leave because I saw all this at the time. I left because the job market scared me and the Army seemed more interesting. But the people I knew who left — for tech, for law, for teaching, for anything that involves other humans and their actual problems — are by and large doing more interesting work than the ones who stayed. More useful work, certainly. Whether they’re happier is a different question. Probably not.

I’ve spent the years since looking for that same density of connection. People you could roll a six with, conversation after conversation. I haven’t really found it elsewhere. I don’t know that I’m right about any of this. I just know I couldn’t justify staying somewhere the incentives seemed so broken. It’s exactly the kind of place I’d want to be, if I could make it make sense.