C. Thi Nguyen

They're public.

You can find them.

And you get quietly enculturated to them.

in graduate school.

It's really common.

And you start getting focused.

And what you get focused on is going up the rankings.

And that's a very specific methodology.

So high-end philosophy journals typically feature a kind of very technical, very careful, very slow work on a set of fairly prescribed questions.

And I do want to say that a lot of this work is extremely important.

And it's very valuable.

But it wasn't my jam.

And, but I found myself working on it, which is kind of weird because it's not like anyone goes into philosophy for worldly success.

Like you basically burned your like life and career opportunities by throwing yourself into stupid discipline.

The only reason to do it is for love.

And then suddenly I found myself working on things that I was bored by for like five years.

I also got super depressed.

And I also like basically lost my love of philosophy and I was going to quit.

And in this case, the thing that I did was I basically ended up

having to ignore the ranking system altogether it was too pervasive it was too powerful i had to get rid of it completely i had to like forswear and alienate it from myself and basically go back to working on things i loved and that involved basically giving up on any kind of status in the profession because what i did was i started working on the philosophy of games and uh that's not really a legitimate topic in philosophy like you're not supposed to work on that that's not real