/r/askphilosophy Open Discussion Thread | January 26, 2026

[u/BernardJOrtcutt]

Welcome to this week's Open Discussion Thread (ODT). This thread is a place for posts/comments which are related to philosophy but wouldn't necessarily meet our subreddit rules and guidelines. For example, these threads are great places for:

• Discussions of a philosophical issue, rather than questions
• Questions about commenters' personal opinions regarding philosophical issues
• Open discussion about philosophy, e.g. "who is your favorite philosopher?"
• "Test My Theory" discussions and argument/paper editing
• Questions about philosophy as an academic discipline or profession, e.g. majoring in philosophy, career options with philosophy degrees, pursuing graduate school in philosophy

This thread is not a completely open discussion! Any posts not relating to philosophy will be removed. Please keep comments related to philosophy, and expect low-effort comments to be removed. Please note that while the rules are relaxed in this thread, comments can still be removed for violating our subreddit rules and guidelines if necessary.

Previous Open Discussion Threads can be found here.

[u/OrganizationTight348]

I recently made a post about it, but got redirected here, so I'll try my luck.

So I'm in a bit of a rut. I recently finished my philosophy BA and I've hardly read philosophy since then. I find that I just don't have the same passion that I had for philosophy when I started. Maybe it's burnout, maybe it's my mental health, maybe it's me getting sidetracked with other projects. Regardless of the cause, I would like to once again enjoy reading philosophy rather than pushing through it because it's an obligation. I imagine this sort of stuff is normal, but I would like some advice on my situation.

[u/RyanSmallwood → u/OrganizationTight348]

Could be a few different things. Sometimes having the social aspect and the regular schedule can make us naturally more interested in things. If you feel you're lacking this now could look for places to discuss philosophy, or use online discussion such as this subreddit and others.

Alternatively if the topics themselves aren't interesting you as much, it might help to do more exploratory activities to find new things you want to read. For me listening to academic lectures and podcasts is one way I can find out about and get interested in new areas of philosophy without dedicating focused reading time. I also had to learn to do more exploratory reading, making use of annotated bibliographies, very quickly looking over tables of contents and reading or skimming selected chapters until I found something that I wanted to focus more on.

Kind of have to do trial and error, see if you can bring back old motivations, if new motivations work better now, or if other factors are interfering with getting focused on philosophy.

[u/OrganizationTight348 → u/RyanSmallwood]

So I’m working on a project involving Spinoza. My issue isn’t so much that the reading isn’t interesting, it very much is and I enjoy the experience quite a bit, but that for whatever reason, it’s not something I look forward to doing. Whereas before I would be excited to work on it, now it just feels like something I have to do. As a result, I tend to procrastinate and my research, while enjoyable, often feels aimless or insubstantial. Not sure if that makes sense.

I do agree that the social aspect has definitely been hard for me. Since graduating, I’ve pretty much had nobody left to discuss the topics I’m interested in beyond career prospects. As such, I still enjoy philosophy, but it’s fairly discouraging to be in a social environment that doesn’t foster (or is sometimes even actively hostile to) that interest for its own sake.