You still can, but I understand your point of view. I am a waiter in a restaurant. My latest wasted direction is writing music I like. But, what I would give to share a life with someone who loved philosophy as much as I do. Luckily, a friend of mine convinced me to buy a place or else I would have nothing. I look forward to retiring. Getting social security if it is there, selling my place or renting it, and then traveling. Don’t you love thinking? Don’t you love ideas? It doesn’t cost much to feed our minds. Just as many others have done and realized, life is not just one thing at one time, but usually two. T.S. Eliot had a job as a clerk, then eventually taught at Harvard. We have to create our legacies perhaps and then enter academia as experts or polymaths. Picasso, Diego Rivera, etc. simply created and then were sought after. Life is practical and whimsical. It’s about lessons. It isn’t really a playground. Imagine being on the manufacturing line in a plant making parts or connecting them. There is a certain privilege to having the time and money to explore what truly interests us. A friend of mine studied English Lit, and like you met her frustrations with old white professors, who thought she was too young and pretty to be there. She eventually had to leave. Her debt leaves her motionless. She did go into computer science. We will see how she ends up faring. But, I know how smart she is, which is neither here nor there, irrelevant, but you cannot keep someone like her down. She is a genius. She is my definition of a real person, my kind of hero, someone I listen to.