Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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What was your dream job/career as a kid? Was it anything remotely realistic?
I remember I wanted to help terraform Mars at NASA because I was a massive sci-fi nerd. I even went into environmental science and wanted to go for that sort of thing, until I realized everyone in environmental science was a depressed dweeb who lied about their stats.
Anyway, now my big dream is to become a writer some day, even if not a great one.
When I was very young, an actor or journalist, and when I was a teenager, a philosopher or occasionally a psychologist (variably academic or practicing). I did want to do a degree (MA, maybe then PhD) in philosophy after my undergraduate degree before going back into finance but I had a crisis of confidence when I struggled with trying to teach myself formal logic (in all fairness, it was at least partially laziness) and so abandoned it.
I’m still not sure whether most good academic analytic philosophers are much more intelligent than me or just hide the relative banality of their ideas behind a tradition of overwrought language and an emphasis on ‘rigor’ that usually just means structuring arguments in a needlessly complex way.
I assure you that you're more than intelligent enough to learn analytic philosophy (along with pretty much everyone else who posts here). It's not that hard, in comparison to say STEM fields.
I don't think it's fair or accurate to say that philosophers are "hiding banal ideas behind overwrought language and needlessly complex arguments". Do you have any examples in mind? Every field has jargon, it's unavoidable. Analytic philosophy jargon is in my opinion not that hard to learn; if you come across an unfamiliar word, you just look it up and then continue reading. There is an initial investment of time required on your part when you're first starting out, but it's nothing insurmountable. I think analytic philosophers generally make a pretty strong effort to make their arguments as easy to understand as possible.
Your reaction is not an uncommon one though - some people who are first getting into philosophy feel like they're being tricked in some way, that philosophers are surely just making all this stuff up, etc. But I think that's just a reaction to the ideas being strange and unfamiliar; it's not proof that philosophers are actually just writing BS.
As for whether the ideas are "banal", I suppose that's somewhat a matter of taste and perspective. You don't have to think that philosophy is interesting. But when people make claims like "tables and chairs don't exist", "there are sentences that are true and false at the same time", or "no one has ever felt pain before", I don't think those are banal claims! I think they strike at the heart of how we think about reality. You might think those claims are false, but that's different from being banal.
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