I think philosophy is valuable as an individual, no guiderails pursuit, but this is heavily biased based on my personal life. I’ve barely read any proper philosophy besides what quoteminers deliver to me in media, maybe the occasional more detailed article etc. but definitely never picked up a tome and took a dive into it. However I spend a lot of time (much more time than I would like, if I had a choice) thinking. Thinking about all sorta shit. I kind of damaged my mind with drugs and misc trauma and for a long time the thoughts I had were very disturbing. However I pushed through, falling deeper in a “hey, I’m already in the abyss, could it really get any worse?” sort of way (secretly fully fearing I was going to discover some sort of new, terrible, inconceivable layer of hell that would render me catatonic or be a final push into suicide). But eventually something just…clicked. First here and there and then slowly all at once. And now things just make sense. And I really like my understanding of reality and it has a lot of complexity and depth that I hope I can share one day, that as user witlessworm said of older philosophy in this thread encompasses other fields (politics, psychology, science, religion, etc.). I beat a lot of my illnesses with it, it helped soothe a lot of unsolvable internal problems I had and couldn’t be helped with by anyone else. I don’t think my thoughts are particularly one of a kind, when I DO learn official concepts and such I find a lot of what I felt I had “discovered” has been around hundreds or even thousands of years (or likely just as long as humans have been sentient) but it felt valuable to have came to such conclusions myself instead of being handed them. Like how you can know something versus BELIEVING something, if that makes sense.

I’m really not trying to huff my own farts, like I promise most of this is just the luck of my circumstances both good and bad and I really don’t have shit to show for my life besides what my noggin cooked me for dinner. But I do wish others could have a similar end product as I have without all the pains along the way and I wonder how this could be accomplished, perhaps by taking existing philosophy and breaking down stuff into fundamentals and trying to give people not the crazy ideas but the tools to find the crazy ideas themselves slowly over time. A lot of pain led me here but this same thing, my thoughts, which tortured me for so long, are what ultimately provided my relief.

This all being said, I do wish to read some actual philosophy books, I just wish I had more time in the day. Definitely one day I will gobble a couple I’m sure, just got to find ones that aren’t too obtuse and written in a language easily processed by me.

I also am not trying to knock the experience of others who have learned through books because ultimately I recognize that different people learn things different ways, of course!