We live in an era where answers abound. Tips, tricks, walkthroughs, and frameworks fill our screens, from engineering blogs to productivity reels. If a question doesn’t lead directly to a solution, it often gets dismissed as a distraction. Within professional platforms like LinkedIn or industry-specific spaces like developer forums, the culture seems to reward speed, clarity, and usefulness. There’s nothing wrong with that. But something is missing.
Philosophical thinking, once considered the backbone of intellectual life, feels strangely out of place. It’s not that people have lost the ability to think deeply. Many are just caught in systems that no longer reward it. Somewhere along the way, we started treating wisdom like an antique: admirable, perhaps, but irrelevant to daily work.
Even discussions around powerful technologies like artificial intelligence rarely move beyond the immediate use cases or tactical implementations. We see endless posts about how to prompt more effectively, how to automate better, how to optimize workflow. But we rarely hear these questions philosophically like: What is intelligence, really? What are we outsourcing when we delegate decisions to machines? What does it mean to create something when part of the creation is no longer human?
The Engineering Mindset
To be fair, engineering culture is built on a noble foundation: it aims to solve problems. Its heroes are not poets but inventors, coders, architects of efficiency. The mindset is empirical, pragmatic, and detail-oriented. It values results over speculation. And so it makes sense that its discourse revolves around tools, frameworks, patches, languages, and execution.
Yet without reflection, this practical mindset risks becoming flat. The world of pure technicality, left unchecked, can become an echo chamber; one where people speak fluently in jargon but struggle to ask why they are building what they are building, or whether they should build it at all. Programming languages, once born from philosophical and mathematical insights, are now often treated like kitchen gadgets; compared, rated, and debated without pausing to consider what they say about thought, logic, or communication itself.
The result is not a lack of intelligence, but a lack of intellectual direction. Not because people aren’t capable of philosophy, but because the environments they work in rarely allow space for it.
Life Hacks Everywhere
There is something oddly universal about the current state of content: whether you’re in tech, cooking, or time management, everything is a “hack.” A better way to do something. A shortcut. A method. This reflects a larger shift in our collective mindset: we want to improve, to optimize, to become more efficient, even in leisure.
But when everything becomes a hack, we lose sight of the bigger picture. The same logic that drives better coding practices or automation tools now governs how people meditate, rest, or even relate to one another. And while some of these methods are genuinely helpful, we are rarely invited to ask: What kind of life are we optimizing toward? What is the value of speed if we do not know the destination?
In this light, even the most well-meaning productivity advice can begin to feel empty. It helps us do more, but not necessarily live better.
The Performance of Professionalism
There is also the question of platform culture. LinkedIn, for example, encourages a particular tone: polished, solution-focused, upbeat. Posts that raise fundamental or ambiguous questions often feel awkward or even disruptive. Algorithms reward certainty. Questions without clear answers get less visibility. Even vulnerability must be stylized.
This creates a strange paradox. We are surrounded by intelligent people working on complex problems, yet few feel free to share their genuine philosophical inquiries. They may wonder about ethics, meaning, or long-term implications, but only in private. Publicly, they stick to what the system can reward.
This is not a moral failure. It’s a structural one. We have built platforms where reflection doesn’t translate well; where wisdom feels like a poor performer compared to templates and KPIs. Thoughtfulness is often seen as unproductive, or worse, reduced to a templated life hack. Even genuine insights can be trivialized when squeezed into formats designed for speed, visibility, and immediate utility.
Academia Isn’t the Answer Either
If LinkedIn and tech blogs fall short in hosting genuine philosophical reflection, surely academia still holds space for it? That would be ideal. But in reality, academic philosophy has its own problems.
Much of it is buried under layers of jargon. It often speaks in a language inaccessible to anyone outside a very specific circle. Worse, it can feel like a game of politics, publishing for tenure, writing for reputation, debating for prestige. The original impulse that gave birth to philosophy, the desire to understand the world and one’s place in it, is frequently lost in the shuffle.
Some papers seem obsessed with proving other papers wrong. Others are so abstract they float completely free of human experience. And while there are brilliant minds in academia doing valuable work, the public rarely hears from them. Their thoughts are filtered through conferences and peer-reviewed journals rather than shared as part of everyday life.
Between Abstraction and Action
So where does that leave someone who wants both clarity and depth? Someone who doesn’t want to retreat into jargon, but also refuses to reduce everything to productivity tips? It leaves them in a kind of in-between space; one that can feel lonely, but is also rich with possibility.
This is the space of the independent thinker. Of the essayist, the reflective engineer, the open-minded business person. People who believe that thinking is not a luxury but a part of living well. People who write not just to explain, but to understand. People who ask why in the middle of a world obsessed with how.
They may not go viral. They may not have immediate impact. But over time, their thoughts form the quiet architecture of meaningful change. Because ideas don’t always win through noise. Sometimes, they win by endurance.
A Call for Reconciliation
Perhaps what we need is not a war between engineering and philosophy, but a reconciliation. A new culture that respects the importance of both tools and thoughts. Where the builder knows why they are building, and the thinker knows how things are built.
This would require humility from both sides. Engineers would have to accept that not all questions have immediate answers. Philosophers would have to accept that some insights are only meaningful when applied. And both would need to listen more, to each other, and to the world.
The truth is, we need each other. Technical solutions without reflection can become dangerous. Reflection without application can become detached. When we bring them together, something powerful happens. A project becomes a purpose. A question becomes a compass. A tool becomes a way to shape the world wisely.
Writing Between the Lines
This is why our philosophical reflections, even if they feel out of place, are essential. They create tension in a space that desperately needs it. They ask questions that don’t have answers, but matter anyway. They invite others to slow down, to think again, to feel something beneath the surface of utility.
And perhaps you are not as alone as you think. There are readers who crave more than life hacks. Listeners who want more than updates. Colleagues who carry unspoken questions in their hearts. Your voice, if it stays true, may become the one they didn’t know they were waiting for.
So write. Speak. Reflect. Even if it feels like shouting into the void. Because in a world where everyone is rushing to say something useful, the most radical thing we can do is say something meaningful.
Image by Miguel Á. Padriñán
Tom’s Blog 