When I used to watch a lot of YouTube, I followed quite a few philosophy youtubers. Most of them made videos about old philosophers and their philosophies. This is what so and so said about this and that. This is what what’s his face meant when he said blah blah blah.

As interesting as I found such videos, that’s not “doing philosophy”. It might be studying philosophy or discussing philosophy, but it’s not doing philosophy.

To do philosophy means to use your own head to crack open the walnut of wisdom. Reading older philosophers certainly has a lot of merit. And I’m sure philosophy students are taught older works to help them see how to do philosophy. But at some point they must be encouraged to do the act themselves, right? Otherwise you’re just a historian of philosophy.

Able to recite verbatim, what Descartes or Wittgenstein said, does not constitute doing philosophy. What do you think about what they said? Were they right? Do you agree? How do you apply it in your life?

I’ve always been interested in building my own philosophy. This has to do with my personality. I’m sure there must be many philosophy students who go to college with a similar goal. I think academia teaches them a lot of good things, but it also takes away their motivation to build anything grand.

If you want to be a successful professional academic, then you have to learn to be cautious. Don’t make claims you can’t back. Forget about grand systems. Take the smallest niche you can find and spend 5 years writing a dissertation on one paragraph of what someone else said.

I feel my lack of academic qualification in philosophy is a positive for me because I still retain the childlike naivety about building grand philosophical systems. I’ve been trying to temper this naivety with my own caution and diligence. This is why my project keeps stalling.

If I had continued to share my entire philosophy in the software analogy system I was building earlier, I think it would have come across as pretty naive. It might have piqued the interest of a few tech bros but no one else.

I went from that system to starting with essays and writing a book. But now even that idea has been abandoned. I’m not forcing any kind of structure on my philosophy anymore.

I’m doing two things:

• Figure out stuff philosophically and apply it to my own life.
• Build arguments, in no particular order, and share those eventually.

I have a complete system behind the scenes which has been working pretty great for me. These might sound like grand claims, but I understand the world pretty well. I understand life and I know why to live, and what to pursue. What I’m fine tuning right now is how to apply it in my life.

But I’m not going to share it as is, because it’s not ready. I have to test it in my own life and then build the arguments in a way that makes sense to a new reader who doesn’t have the complete picture that I have in my head.

To me, this is what doing philosophy looks like. Figuring out stuff for yourself on your own.

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