Guys, I need your help. I know most of you are retards that don't read but you're still smarter than most people...

youtube.com/watch?v=IycFUuKqq58

How do you picture being hired to "write philosophical works"?
Would you get paid by the hour? By the page?

this feel free to do philosophy in undergrad, and feel free to try and study something at the graduate level, but your goal should be trying to find work that is not teaching philosophy in higher ed
>t. philosophy undergrad who gave up on going to a philosophy MA because of precisely this advice from a senior, tenured mentor

>There's a high chance you'll be jerked around as a lecturer even once you complete a Phd (except perhaps if you go to a top 10 grad school).

This. Even if you're in a top tier program you have mediocre chances of being a professor at best.

For every 100 people who get PhDs from top ranked programs in their field, probably 50 will just leave academia afterward or do one shitty postdoc and then leave, another 25 will do a few postdocs or adjunct slavery jobs and then leave. Of the remaining 25, most will end up at mediocre unprestigious postings, with a minority ending up in prestigious tenure-track postings, and still, all of these will probably have to do postdocs and adjunct slavery positions with no long-term certainty, no job stability, no benefits, having to travel to wherever you can get work. And on top of that, you will probably have to work at some shit or mediocre uni for 5-10 years before moving to a tenure track position at the prestigious uni, if you're in that fraction of PhDs who actually make it to one. This isn't even to mention the surprisingly high number of people who never finish the PhD, including some who never finish despite spending most of a decade on it. A lot of professors only "make it" at like 50.

Also, my friend recently saw job postings for professors that fucking demanded "experience," meaning 2+ postdocs. So, you can't even be such a hot commodity that you get insta-hired anymore, you HAVE to suck postdoc/adjunct dick for several years to even be considered. The whole industry is moving toward models like this, adjunct slavery is the norm not the exception. Hopefully there will be a massive collapse soon.

>The people I know who have landed positions in depts that are tenure-equivalent have generally been extremely resourceful and productive off the get-go
>had the bigshot supervisors, made all the big connections.
Also this. The kinds of people who are that fraction of insta-hires at prestigious tenure track jobs are, in my experience, among the worst scholars, they're just really good at networking. They are people who are born to network. No passion or talent, but really good at twisting their projects to be trendy.

>And those are the ones where everything is on point and there's a good chunk of luck involved
This too. Even they need luck. As one adviser I had said, there are plenty of people who SHOULD get the jobs who simply aren't getting them - genuine talent is not a guarantee of success.

All this being said, it can be alright. I'll probably get some kind of job but I don't really give a shit. I also wouldn't give a shit if I taught community college. Careerist people who are dead-set on prestigious jobs would probably shoot themselves at that thought, especially if they get sucked into the country club social-climber atmosphere of academia where it's embarrassing not to be part of fancy in-groups. I'm lucky to be in a program that actually gets people hired.

Also, writing good shit has nothing necessarily to do with being in a PhD program or having a PhD or being a professor. The vast vast majority of academics are just boring people who write trendy shit. Nothing original to say. In fact a lot of people are outright surprisingly stupid or ignorant of things you'd think they should know. But none of this matters if you can publish trendy bullshit, and if you're good at networking. Again, all this being said, it is nice to be able to socialize with other people who genuinely care about the autistic niche nonsense I have decided to focus my every waking moment on. I'm tempted to say with bitterness that smart interesting people are rare, and that "elite" education is a joke, and I have to hunt and scrape to find people whose brains are even turned on. But that would be one-sided and ungrateful. I have no frame of reference so I've nearly forgotten how horrible it was to actually work for a living and literally wonder whether my coworkers even had theory of mind. 0.1% cool autistic people to potentially befriend is still orders of magnitude better than 0.000001%, obviously.

My tldr summation of whether a PhD is worth it:
- can you get into an elite program
- can you game the system and make it work for you (are you a careerist? are you an autist who wants to be on glorified welfare while you read Sanskrit for 8 years, but then be an unemployable weirdo after that? can you be the exception to various rules for why getting a PhD is GENERALLY a bad idea for the AVERAGE person?)
- can you reliably reality check yourself, so you don't get caught up in academia's glossy image and fail to notice that it's really a self-perpetuating slave-driving diploma mill underneath? can you stop yourself from drifting into fictions like "All scholars are professors and all professors are scholars! Graduate students live the life of the mind! I'm a member of elite now, so I now identify with this lifestyle of drinking coffee and pretending that I read the New York Review of Books!"? can you keep your eye on your actual goals, whether idealistic or careerist (see above point)?

Also don't let any of this dissuade you from BEING a philosopher. The question is not, should you dedicate your life to wisdom. That's up to you, not up to whether the current shithole society has a culture that necessarily recognizes or promotes wisdom via its institutions. The question is whether you feel that a PhD is the best way to further your pursuit of wisdom, and whether you can "study Philosophy" (game the PhD system) without losing your actual commitment to philosophy.

You have to attend one of the top PhD programs to have any shot at a professorship. If you don't get into a top program, you'll be lucky to teach English at community college.

I personally picture it as a crime drama type story of rise from the bottom to mafia overlord status. Basically I will threaten local business with philosophical inquiry until they agree to pay me protection. If they refuse I will pester them with soul-destroying questions such as "Why is there something instead of nothing?". If they agree to pay protection, I will write obscurantist essays to protect them from other philosophers whose ideas might cause them existential anxiety. I will do this by using obscurantism, vagueness, and verbosity in order to mask the real existential issues underlying life and thus keep up the illusion that everything is safe and a-ok.

Focus on your doing well in your bachelor's. Start thinking about a Phd when you are wrapping up your master's.

t. Phd student

real talk. If you're a white male you stand 0% chance of finding a job in the humanities. Just the way things are these days.

For research positions? Yeah, it's absolutely saturated. The work required of you, from the end of undergraduate onwards (assuming you successfully maneuver the massive bureaucracies overseeing each of your successive hurdles; i.e. acceptance to a Masters, a Doctorate, the infinite tedious publications, a professorship, a research position, tenure, etc., etc.) will be the discussion of either secondary literature, or the minutia of dead men.
You would absolutely be pursuing a professorship for the wrong reasons: if you are not there to teach, you are in the wrong place.

That's not very good advice in the US. I don't know about elsewhere. In the US, you want to have cultivated relationships with professors who can open doors for you, give you the inside scoop, review your applications, and most importantly, write incredibly good personalized letters of recommendation for you. You also need to be tailoring at least the latter half of your undergraduate education toward writing good writing samples to whatever programs you are applying to, and generally learning whatever shit you want to specialize in so you can not look like a dipshit on your statement of intent. Many people apply for PhD programs at the beginning of their final year of undergrad, because the year starts in Autumn and most American universities stop accepting applications in December.

So if you want to apply the year AFTER you graduate, you'd have to take a gap year. Which is usually advised against, because it raises questions about why you didn't smoothly transition into a higher degree program, but also because it removes you from your studies, and it removes you from the professors who are supposed to be remembering who the fuck you are so they can write letters for you.

It's not really fair to shit on young people for not understanding the labyrinth of academic tiers and etc. OP has no way of knowing how weird it is. He just wants to do good work.

>OP has no way of knowing how weird it is. He just wants to do good work.
But itt's just basic common-sense to ask yourself:
who would want to pay for my labor, and why?

>you're still smarter than most people
My normie coworkers and peers unironically have a better reading comprehensions and memories compared to the average Yea Forums user. You will maybe fine one intelligent person out of every hundred that comes here. I am not intelligent and I know nothing of education or philosophy, but a wise man once advised me to be wary of pompous Yea Forums pseuds.

Remember the golden rule:
Don't believe anything you read on Yea Forums

I don't believe you

definitely look into it at uni OP. you're not gonna know unless you do the legwork yourself. don't sell yourself short.

Id say go for a history major. If you focus on western stuff you usualy go over all the important philosphers in modest detail. Also museum/local gov work is super easy to come by if worst comes to worst. You can often still teach Philosophy as a teacher in "western thought" in some class and its a lot more economicaly stable.

No philosophy professor has ever wrote anything of note, with Wittgenstein being the exception.

Based ESL retard

you Kant be serious

teaching in the US is garbage
if you can, run to another country where you'll gain some clout just for being an american

Ulaanbataar University seems like a nice hellhole