A Philosopher’s Life in the Real World

“Truth is not conceptual. We can never understand or realize it through concepts and ideas. Truth is not to be understood. Rather it is meant to be experienced, tasted like nectar. There is nothing to understand about nectar. One must taste it, drink it, and experience it. The Truth is like that. It is to be experienced and realized, not speculated about.”
~Anam Thubten

First off, I just want to say that I loved majoring in philosophy. My parents wanted me to study computer science or nursing, but after my first philosophy class that I took as an elective, I was insatiable.

I started out majoring in Psychology and Sociology. I wanted to be a therapist and help others, but once I realized that many of the psychology courses that I had to take revolved around pathologies and diagnoses (which I felt was a more close-minded view of the mind) I changed my major to Philosophy. I felt that I could learn more about the mind that way, because Philosophy classes were more open-ended and allowed you to ask the hard questions. In Philosophy classes, we were encouraged to look at things from different perspectives. Professors took a more holistic approach, exposing us to scholars who studied reality itself, and how our environment can shape our behaviors and mindset.

Unfortunately, my grades were not good enough to get accepted into a competitive graduate program right out of college. Oddly enough, I had excelled in the philosophy courses, but not as much in any other subject. I was learning so much about myself and others outside of the classroom that I didn’t prioritize my academic career. However, I knew that this period of my life was for learning, one way or another, and figuring out how to put what I was learning both in and out of school into practice for the greater good.

After graduation, I wanted to travel. This way, I could continue learning about life, about myself and the world around me. I was really interested in other cultures, and what was going on outside my scope of day-to-day life. I had wanted to visit Asia since high school – somewhere like China, Thailand, or Nepal. When I started dating someone who is half-Chinese, I proposed the idea of a trip to China to them, and we set off for a 3-month trip together.

At first, I tried to apply my knowledge of the developing mind by working with children. I had sat in on a Philosophy Outreach Program (POP) session as an undergrad and thought that the program was a great concept. During my trip abroad, I volunteered as an English teacher. I got to experience a different culture in China and planned lessons to teach students of varying ages. I learned what the classroom is like for children in a different country, and how teaching can look different in different places with different historical traditions.

When I returned to the US, I continued to work with children, but I wanted to work in an environment where children had more freedom and creativity, so I found work as a Substitute Teacher or Assistant Teacher at Montessori schools around Boston, MA. After several months and because of some personal issues, I left my job as an After-School Teacher. I cherish my time at one particular school in Newton, MA because of the beautiful children and supportive and friendly co-workers.

I started to look for other employment opportunities and put my resume online. One day, I got a call from a recruiter at Amazon. The recruiter was looking for people who had experience working with data, and who had a Bachelor’s degree. Because I had some data-entry experience from my time working as a Marketing Assistant in high-school, I qualified for the position. I didn’t know it at the time, but my career trajectory for the next several years was going to change.

At Amazon I was exposed to Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. This is something I had always been curious about but was never really exposed to in this way. My team was responsible for curating data that would be used to train Machine Learning algorithms. I would go home and continue to research Machine Learning so that I could really understand what was going on behind the scenes. What really struck me during my time there was how people didn’t think deeply about the data curation, like I did. As a group, people tended to work quickly and monotonously (I think this may have had to do with the pressure that the company put on people to be highly productive) and didn’t pay too much attention to the details.

I worked for other companies like Boston Dynamics and Perceptive Automata doing the same type of work – labeling datasets that were being used for model training. I’m still doing the same type of work today. I’ve been able to apply what I’ve learned as a philosophy major (namely problem-solving and critical thinking) both in my career and in my personal life. I’ve found that I have a slightly different perspective than the software engineers and research scientists that I’ve been working closely with for over 5 years now – I tend to look at the “far-reaching implications”, and how small details may contribute to that. This blends the problem-solving mindsets of the engineers with the abstract thinking of a philosopher.

As for my personal life, I became a bit more spiritual and religious. This is an element I had been missing since I was a child. I grew up Catholic, going to CCD and occasionally church on holidays, but I never really believed in anything greater than myself. In fact, I denounced it, largely because I hadn’t found any proof. However, in college my experiences both outside of the classroom and in my Asian philosophy class taught me that there was in fact something greater that we were all a part of. As a student of metaphysics, “the Self”, Buddhist philosophy and Daoist philosophy, I really felt as though these ancient teachers and texts that we were reading from were communicating about something that I deeply understood for much of my life but could never quite put into words. Since then, I devoted myself to Buddhist practice (although I am skeptical of calling myself a Buddhist).

Today, I apply what I have learned as a philosophy major to my personal experience – I prioritize taking a phenomenological perspective and pay attention to what I am feeling in my body. I learned about this through the writings of Merleau-Ponty and Evan Thompson. I relate to the world from a mindset of embodied cognition and Buddhist metaphysics, in which the environment and my personal experience has a strong influence on what I am currently thinking and feeling, and the actions I am taking as a result. I have incorporated this into my behaviors, because I believe that there is a causal chain that is playing out with every decision that I make, and I want the effects to be good, not bad.

Since I graduated in 2017, I have attended various philosophy conferences around the country and networked with other philosophers. In 2023, an abstract that I had submitted to a conference was accepted and I got to present a poster at The Science of Consciousness conference in Taormina, Italy. Part of the reason I did this is because if I do decide to study Philosophy in graduate school someday, I will need something on my application to balance out the less-than-desirable grades I got in college. I also was attempting to keep philosophy in my life, because it was something that I loved, and I didn’t want to let go of it.

I am still considering graduate study in philosophy, but I know that I can apply my interests in different ways in my day-to-day life. I can put into practice what I have learned both at my job, in my writing, in the way that I solve problems, make decisions, and relate to others. I changed my own life by ceasing to use substances as a coping mechanism and celebrated 3 years of sobriety this month. I truly believe that I would not have been able to do so if I hadn’t learned about how the mind works and how capable of change humans are when they put their mind to it.

If you’re approaching graduation, consider all of your options. Think about what you want to get out of life, and not just about your career path. Think about the impact you want to have on others, what your values are, and what you want to be proud of at the end of your life. What things really bring you joy, and make you feel alive? When you study philosophy academically, it’s easy to think of Descartes or Hume or Schopenhauer as disembodied voices with their thought experiments and storytelling. Don’t forget – philosophers are real people who are trying to solve human problems.

Also, things can sometimes go unplanned, and various doors can open, like when I had to stop teaching and got the call from a recruiter. Be open to new opportunities. Like my dad has always told me, “You are never locked into anything.”