Four months ago, before I became the plucky though dipsomaniacal crossdresser you know and love, I was an adjunct philosophy professor at a major research university, which I don’t know whether to laugh or cry about. I guess it’s always best to laugh in these situations, because crying makes you look like a sissy boy and frankly I find that kind of thing disgusting.

In this video I’m gonna recount my rise from grace, or how this became hotter than this. [

[These are their stories]

I mentioned in my last video that in college I studied neuroscience. Well, I actually worked as a research assistant in couple labs, and that’s when I realized that on a day-to-day basis, neuroscience is less about unlocking the secrets of consciousness than it is about collecting volumes of fMRI images of brains of people looking at pictures of faces while tasting something good versus tasting human shit, and then using soon-to-be-discredited statistical methods to analyze those images.

I don’t know, maybe that is how you unlock the secrets of consciousness, but I got pretty bored with it at the time.

So I added a second major in philosophy, thinking that was guaranteed to be more exciting. I mean, it was advertised as a quest for truth, beauty, and justice. [Oh, the folly of youth.]

I guess what I liked about philosophy as an undergrad was that you get go on this multi-millennial drive-thru of ideas, reading Plato one week, then Kant, then Foucault. It was like a guided tour of European history’s most boring homosexuals.

So I graduated and put my philosophy degree to use at a job as a Segway tour guide before realizing that I was unequipped to deal with the private sector [they expect results].

So I applied to philosophy PhD programs and got accepted at a pretty good one. And for the next two years I lived like a goddamn king on a sixteen-hundred dollar a month fellowship stipend. I know it sounds glamorous, but it really wasn’t. Here’s why.

Part I: Intellectual reasons

When you study any subject as an undergraduate, you’re given a very wide survey of the field. To an intellectually curious person, this is fun and exciting, since you get exposed to a lot of new information very quickly. But, whether you’re in the sciences or humanities, when you advance to the graduate level you’re expected to focus. In philosophy, that means choosing a specialty and eventually a research topic, which you’ll spend several years writing a dissertation about.

Because there are hundreds of other people writing dissertations in the field, and you’re expected to contribute something original, you end up having to narrow in on a research topic that’s really specialized. So specialized, in fact, that it strains the human ability to give a shit.

Let’s take a look at some recent philosophy dissertation topics. We’ve got:

“Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutic Ontology: Between Aristotle and Kant”

“A Gadamerian Analysis of Roman Catholic Hermeneutics: A Diachronic Analysis of Interpretations of Romans 1:17-2:17”

“The Paradox of Nature: Merleau-Ponty’s Semi-Naturalistic Critique of Husserlian Phenomenology”

Fuck! Without the aid of Merleau-Ponty’s semi-naturalistic approach, how are we ever going to develop an adequate critique of Husserlian phenomenology? This is a serious problem. Good thing someone spent the final years of his young life writing about it.

Now to be fair I haven’t actually read these dissertations. For all I know they could be really brilliant and interesting pieces of writing, despite having inaccessible, jargon-laden titles.

But you see the point I’m trying to make. The philosopher Daniel Dennett said that much of academic philosophy amounts to discovering “higher-order truths about chmess,” chmess being a variant on chess that nobody actually plays.

I think there’s a certain personality type that enjoys difficult intellectual problems for their own sake, and if that’s you, academia might be a perfectly good place for you. But it’s not for me.

The worst for me were conferences, where you’d have to listen to twelve straight hours of mind-numbing, inconsequential, scholastic jabbering, and then go to dinner to talk about it all over again. I used to just skip dinner and drink a pint of bourbon alone in my hotel room and spy on people in the courtyard pool, because goddamn I needed to feel something. I’m honestly surprised my health survived these years of my life. Fortunately I have this naturally gracile body that’s easy to maintain.

[borderline bulimia jokes]

Part II: political reasons

Right-wing ding-dongs like to paint academia as some sort of leftist madrasa where Marxist feminism is the only permissible worldview. This is an exaggeration, but it’s not that much of an exaggeration.

I was once in an advanced political philosophy seminar with a bunch of other grad students, and the reading we were to discuss that week was the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick’s book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia. None of us in this seminar were able to mount any plausible arguments against Nozick, not because he’s correct, but because we had so little experience arguing against anything that far right. Everyone in this room was a reasonably intelligent and articulate philosophy PhD student, but we’d all cut our teeth dissecting the little squabbles between Rawls and Habermas, and we had no experience arguing against anything as far right as the political views that most Americans actually hold.

Now maybe it’s okay to focus on these little quibbles and not get bogged down with defending the basics of your worldview, but I personally find that boring. I don’t give a damn about the petty infighting between French neo-Marxists and Italian neo-Marxists. I want to see the critical theory people debate the libertarians. Now that’s a conference I’d fucking pay to go to. But that kind of thing doesn’t happen very much in academia. You have to go to YouTube for the real entertainment, and also, frankly, for the real debate.

There’s also a certain amount of genuine leftist bullshit passing itself off as scholarship. I was once in a comparative literature seminar that I foolishly took in the hopes of getting to read something written with a decent prose style, or at least something by an emotionally competent human being. Boy was I disappointed when on the first day the professor made two allusions to “my good friend Derrida.” Those are quotation marks around “my good friend” because he mentioned that Derrida was his friend every time it came up. Pass the cyanide, honey.

Anyway, the low point of this guy’s endless, beginningless, argument-free impromptu lectures came when he baldly asserted that the poetry of Milton had a direct influence on the workings of ISIS. Yes, this would be John Milton, the 17th century English poet, and ISIS, the contemporary Syrian terrorist organization. And what evidence did the professor adduce in support of this outrageous claim? None whatso-fucking-ever. And the other grad students in the room just sat there nodding knowingly, taking notes like a bunch of sycophants. No one raised their hand, no one said, “Excuse me professor, but what in Jesus’ name are you fucking talking about?” I didn’t even say anything. I had no spine!

The only explanation I can think of for this was that the professor had this reflexive hatred of himself, of English literature, of basically all of Western culture, and so he had to hallucinate that Islamic terrorism is in some way the outcome of over-zealously reading Paradise Lost.

I guess this is what being good friends with Derrida does to you.

And can someone remind me again how studying this shit is helpful to the working class? Oh that’s right it isn’t, it’s just a bunch of upper-middle-class white people discovering higher order truths about chmess.

Now I might’ve been able to put up with all this if I’d been sure that there was a stable career ahead of me. But there was no such thing. Universities take on more grad students than there are academic jobs, and tenure-track positions are rapidly disappearing, with temporary adjunct positions taking their place. Now, if you have a PhD in physics or economics, you can always go into the private sector. But, in philosophy, there is no private sector. No one is expecting results. There are no results.

Pure love is the only justification for doing it, and I didn’t love it.

So, I realized that I couldn’t live with myself if I continued on. I finished my master’s coursework and I quit. There was an unexpected coda to my academic career last spring when an old professor of mine got sick and I was hired to teach his class for him. So I did get to taste absolute power once, but now that that’s over, I’m out.

Over the last year I’ve been employed as a legal assistant, an Uber driver, and a copywriter.

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It hasn’t always been easy, but on those nights when I’m scrubbing some 19-year-old bitch’s strawberry daiquiri colored vomit out of my upholstery at 2 in the morning, I try to remind myself, at least no one is ever again going to make me read the fucking Phenomenology of Spirit.

A year ago my plan was to start writing fiction, and I stuck to it for a while, but without much encouragement or external motivation it was pretty difficult, and I realized that appreciating good literature doesn’t mean you’ll be able to produce it. When it finally sunk in with me that I’m not the next Nabokov, and I got pretty depressed for a while. I started to wish there was some magical place where a total lack of any discernible talent, intelligence or interpersonal skills had ever been an obstacle to anyone’s success.

Eeeeeeeehhhh!

If you liked this video, tell me you love me, that you’ll love for ever, that you need me, that you’ll never leave.

If that sounds like too much commitment you could always support me on Patreon like these people, upright citizens and phenomenal lovers all.