Hi, got a philosophy degree 20 years ago. I had been a hacker as a teen so I just got a job in tech after I graduated. Later went on to get an MBA to move into

Hi, got a philosophy degree 20 years ago. I had been a hacker as a teen so I just got a job in tech after I graduated. Later went on to get an MBA to move into the business side and I’m currently in a leadership role at a consulting firm around tech strategy, infra and software dev. I make better money than a software dev at a top tier tech company for what it’s worth. I think the degree was great. It basically teaches you how to argue a point, makes you a better writer, and forces you to at least temporarily accept viewpoints that you disagree with if only to try to disprove them. If you’re looking to philosophy to tell you what’s true, you’re going to be disappointed. The history of philosophy is a series of arguments. It is instructive to understand those arguments as the questions have been extensively explored, and you’ll almost certainly go further by reading arguments formulated over years rather than trying to think through the problem on your own. It’s sort of a shorthand in philosophy to simply refer to a set of arguments by the name of the person writing about them, which is why “who said what when” is important - more so than any other academic discipline, philosophy is a dialectic stretching back as far as the written word, and order is important to understanding. Nietzsche is a reaction to Kant and Hegel, and his arguments are far more coherent in that context. The way you apply these lessons throughout your life is basically how you cope. For a long time I felt trapped in a life I didn’t want, and I found a lot of solace in existentialism as a way to accept the circumstances without accepting an outcome. Nothing in Sartre or Camus tells you this explicitly and I’m pretty sure their experiences were more about life in Nazi-occupied France than being a closeted trans person, but they provide a starting point and a framework for thinking about problems.