Before I answer your question properly, I want to say something about friendship — about what it actually means that you came to me with this at all. A real friend is not someone who happens to share your interests. It's someone for whom your concerns become their concerns, automatically, without negotiation. Whatever is at issue for you is at issue for me. There is no clean separation of interests between people who genuinely care for each other. We live in common.
Which means when I give you advice, I'm not doing you a favour. I'm doing what the relationship requires. Don't thank me for it.
Now — the thing I actually want to say. I've been watching smart people waste themselves on cleverness for a long time, and I want to name it plainly so you can recognise it when you see it in yourself.
There is a kind of thinking that looks like rigour but is actually a form of avoidance. It subdivides, qualifies, constructs elaborate logical puzzles, debates the precise meaning of words — and in doing so, stays permanently at a safe distance from the questions that actually matter. It feels productive. It requires real intelligence. And it leads nowhere.
People are drowning. They are stretching out their hands. And the clever man is parsing definitions.
Here is what I want from wisdom — what I think you want from it too, underneath everything. I want it to help with death, which is coming. With fear, which is already here. With the gap between the life I'm living and the life I believe is possible. With the moments when everything I've built feels fragile and the moments when I can't tell whether I'm living well or just performing it.
Those are the problems. Any framework that doesn't address them — that gets lost instead in technical ingenuity — has broken its promise. And philosophy made a large promise. It said it would make us the equal of whatever we most fear. Hold it to that.
Frankness and simplicity befit true goodness. The more elaborate the system, the more suspicious I become.
You don't have unlimited time — none of us do. And even if you did, learning superfluous things at the expense of necessary ones would still be madness. Stay close to what actually helps. Stay close to what is real. The clever arguments will always be there, waiting to seduce you into spending another year on questions that don't matter. Don't go.
Yours, with no patience left for games,