Of what use is philosophy?

When I started writing here I was a graduate student working towards a doctorate in philosophy. I was disaffected and disillusioned with the way academic institutions functioned, their priorities and incentives, who seemed to benefit, and why. But I still believed that philosophy was a worthwhile activity and that a life committed to philosophical work was a life well lived. What I believed then---and still believe---is that philosophical practice needs better institutions and that the means of producing "academic philosophy" belong in the hands of the people doing that labor. There is a great deal of artificial scarcity in philosophy that only serves elite institutions and their beneficiaries.

We also live in a time where almost all academic philosophy has very little value. It does not address the world that we actually inhabit, it is too self-regarding, and it fails to give us any insight into what matters. In the United States, philosophy is practiced by people who are almost entirely insulated from reality, whether by their identity, their acceptance of exceptionalist propaganda, or their social and institutional relations. Philosophy is supposed to be a liberatory force on our habits of reasoning. The academy, as an institution, will only ever seek to reinforce its own power.

There are plenty of polemics against institutional academic philosophy that you can read, but they are all carrying on the tradition of philosophy that is by and for institutional academic philosophers. They are also, mostly, by people like me who failed to "make it" in academic philosophy and who feel harmed by a social institution that let them down in some way. I'm not interested in polemics.

If you care about philosophy, if you have read some philosophy or want to pursue a more "philosophical" life, what should you do? What does it mean to "love wisdom" now, at this moment in history? I don't know the answers to these questions. I don't know if it is possible for me to either fully participate in, or fully break from, the patterns of academic philosophy that I tried for a long time to habituate myself to.

I think the use of philosophy, if there is any, is entirely found in doing it. I hope that if I start doing philosophy again, that it will be of some use.