Does anyone else feel a little like they're in an uphill

I'm a PhD student at a prestigious university and I just spent an hour writing an email to my mind-bogglingly brilliant autodidact friend about how fucking awful academia is, and how it's all going to collapse within a decade or two at most

The only things you are missing by not being in academia are the constant impetus to improve, and the constant reminder that you're in a race against other people and you should be checking your progress against them as objective markers of your own success.

Autodidacts usually sputter out because they never hit the successive plateaux of effort and self-sacrifice involved in educating oneself. Learning how to learn is a series of milestones where you realize you were a baby before you hit this milestone, and then hitting another one and realizing the last one was small fries compared to it, and so on. Grad students are forced to hit 1, maybe 2 of those milestones. Undergrads are rarely forced to hit one at all and basically just spend 4 years farting around doing nothing. The only worthwhile grad students are themselves autodidacts, relative to their shitdick peers who hit the first or second plateau and stagnate there. Getting published academically doesn't mean dick either, it means you did the correct little dance to publish a piece of shit no one will ever read. It's a paper mill.

All autodidacts have to do is keep reading endlessly, and set real goals for themselves in terms of comprehension, and keep doing the latter every time you hit those goals.

If your only goal is to have understanding on par with a grad student, you could pay me $50 to "tutor" you in how to do that. I'd show up to your house with my list of required readings for oral comprehensive exams, about 200 books that I'm expected to kinda-sorta read and skim for basic comprehension. Congratulations, you are now apparently qualified to teach undergraduates! If you want to actually be an intelligent person, then make your whole life about reading, and see it as a work in progress until you're dead.

>they have their works published
No they don't.
>they have feedback and guidance from professors
>They have people to share ideas with and debate
Being an autodidact does not mean that you just sit on your desk after work and read books alone and frankly this is a stupid misconception.
Unless you're talking post grad I think you severely overestimating philosophy undergrads or any undergrad for that matter.

Make friends with similar interests, start something yourself that attracts like-minded people, make the most of what you do have. Fucking hide in the philosophy section at your library and when someone makes the mistake of walking down your aisle attack them relentlessly with your brilliant half-baked ideas.

Fuck the educational system, it is a proverbial puppy mill

Also I am reading Vita Nuova as of tonight

>>9985629
Thank you for the reassuring words. It may sound idiotic, but I resolved to do just that 9 months ago. I made a contract with myself, with God being my witness, that I will pursue this path and I will work every single day to do it. Every since then I've started with the Greeks and have read them every single day of my life. I put myself on a sort of quasi-course plan which consists of Greek literature, Modern Literature (1400 AD owards), and language learning. This sounds like much, and it is when I also have to juggle it along with college full time and a part time job. Some days I don't have enough time to do it all, but I always make time to read the greeks at the very least.

My only anxiety is that I am not being tested on this and I don't know who to debate with besides hipsters on campus, I have no point of reference. I feel like a martial artist who practices his form every single day, but has never engaged in a sparring match. How do I know I am not a fraud?

>>9985640
I am not talking about undergrad, but being enrolled in an undergrad program at a prestigious college already gives you a foot in the door compared to someone like me. It took me until my third year of going to an engineering college that I have learned absolutely nothing the first 21 years of my life. Everything I learned amounted to a blank page. I feel more contempt for myself than anything for not trying harder in my youth when it mattered.

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>>9985667
>>9985629
as much as i admire autodidacts and agree with the above posters that the educational system is severely broken (even bordering on serfdom when you factor in the huge debts in america), from a practical standpoint the shiny baubles of a PhD and publishing credits are not worthless. they signal to people with power that you know what you are talking about. they let you get teaching gigs. at least for the sciences they explicitly qualify you for certain kinds of jobs in industry (i.e. the non-wageslave jobs).

i'm aware of how house-of-cardsy the whole "get a degree in academia so you can be qualified to teach people in academia" thing is, but what's the alternative? pick up a trade and read chaucer on the side? no offense but i'd rather teach a few shitty undergraduate classes at a community college than be a plumber.

>>9985734

>(even bordering on serfdom when you factor in the huge debts in america)

>bordering on

Even if you were to file for bankruptcy in later years there's still no getting around their fleecing. It's a giant racket now.

>>9985629
>Grad students are forced to hit 1, maybe 2 of those milestones.

explain the feeling of hitting one of these milestones to me

>>9985600
Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey's 'History of Political Philosophy' is a great book to ground you in the field whenever you feel lost.

I also recommend Leo Strauss's 'What is Political Philosophy', 'Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism'.

Carl Schmitt's Concept of the Political, the edition with the notes by Strauss

Reading Allan Blooms translation of The Republic with the interpretive essay.

For modern thought look towards Kojeve's 'Introduction to the reading of Hegel'

The leo strauss center website also has archived audio of most of his lectures he gave to his students and some have pdf's with them transcribed verbatim with notes by scholars.

I hope this will help

autodidact brainlet here

Just wanted to remind everyone that consistency is the single most important thing to anything
Without a solid routine, you're basically fucked
That is all

>>9985600
Philosophy is dead anyway. Who cares.

>>9986442
This. .01 * 1,000,000 > 1000 * 5

>tfw just want a simple life to read my books
>second year of college, will have to finish it and do an internship
>after that will probably try and get a job at the public library and try to get in the state college to study brazilian portuguese + Italian or +French or +Latin or +German with focus on Literature (here you can do just Portuguese or Portuguese + one other language, also includes Japanese and Greek, and you get to choose focus on translation or literature)

>>9985600
>wants to be a philosopher
>gets mad bcuz he dont get enougth attetion/support

Lol if the love for knowledge isnt enougth for you then give up, this is not your path my child. I recommend you to look for other options more suitable for your needs like bussines administrator or clown. Best of luck!!! Byeee~

most philosophical societies will let you join debates etc as a member of the public with no affiliation to the school. it's not like every guest speaker they have made it through college, and a lot of the most sought after speakers were kicked out of academia.

>>9986442
The autodidact thread's motto should be
>If you should put even a little on a little, and should do this often, soon this too would become big.

In pretty much anything you do, if you just keep doing it, you will achieve more than the person who spent 5 years fucking around trying to figure out the perfect plan for doing it. Obviously being serious and fastidious about planning is also very necessary, but you need to have an image of yourself simply wading into undiscovered country for its own sake. Plan by night, travel by day, or something like that, always with a balance of the two.

There is no perfect way to read, there is no perfect itinerary. Especially in the early phases of learning, just try to do as much as you possibly can.

>>9986402
What I just wrote in this post is a good example of hitting a milestone of comprehension. I can't tell you how much I would do differently if I could just go back. Instead of trying to create some picture-perfect list of things I'm supposed to read, figuring out every step of the way before I've even taken the first step, I would have just thrown myself into various things.

After several years of serious study, you will eventually get a synoptic view of the thing you're trying to understand. You still won't know a lot of things, but you will have a sense of what you don't know, and a sense of what to do next. But you also immediately realise that, while you just climbed Everest relative to your own perspective, your Everest is the newbie training mountain for the people who ACTUALLY know what the fuck they're doing.

It's kind of like reaching adulthood after adolescence, and realising simultaneously that you can do whatever you want, that you are completely free in a certain sense relative to your adolescent perspective, but also that real life has none of the training wheels you had in adolescence. It's a dialectic of freedom and fate, freedom and contingency.

The #1 thing I think has been lost from academia is that realisation. These kids are so coddled, every aspect of the learning process has been systematically depressed and flayed out and smoothed over to make it easier for rich kids, whose parents don't want them to have a shitty time, that they literally don't even know what it means to be an intellectual adult anymore. The experience has been stolen from all but a deranged few, who are driven to it by some unaccounted-for statistical anomaly in their character.

It has been burned into students these days that if you take "PHILOSOPHY 4053: Foucault," you have gained the metaphysical attribute of "I know Foucault." They don't really think, What did I actually DO in that class? I half-assedly read 3/4 of the readings, which amounted to 300~ odd pages of selections from Foucault's later work, not even his earlier. When this is all you have experienced, from high school on into a PhD program in Princeton, it's easy to think that's all there is to learning.