Where Have All the Philosophers Gone?

I love philosophy. Not in an academic sense, but in the way that it forces me to think about purpose, meaning, and the fears we all share. It’s one of the few disciplines that doesn’t pretend to have all the answers. It sits with uncertainty, asks uncomfortable questions, and teaches you that the struggle to understand is often more valuable than any neat conclusion.

That’s why I keep coming back to it. That’s also why I find it strange that I can’t name a single contemporary philosopher who’s actually helping me navigate the social media and AI age.

I know the ancient Greeks. I’ve read some Nietzsche. But who’s doing this work today? Who’s thinking through the problems we’re actually facing right now? If philosophy matters as much as I believe it does, why does it feel so absent from the conversations that shape our lives?

I decided to try and answer that question.

Dense, Academic, and Disconnected

Modern philosophy has abandoned the public. You can see it in two ways.

First, the language. I tried reading Byung-Chul Han’s Burnout Society. It’s only 60 pages. It took me two weeks, and I’m still not sure I fully understood it. The ideas felt important, but the writing was so dense that I had to fight for every paragraph.

The book is about achievement society: how we’ve internalized the demand to perform, to optimize, to exhaust ourselves in pursuit of productivity. And there’s something painfully ironic about that. The very people suffering from burnout, the ones who might benefit most from understanding what’s happening to them, will never make it through this book. A diagnosis written in a language only the healthy can read. It doesn’t aim to cure, only to describe the disease to other doctors. The patient was never the audience. The epidemic spreads while the physicians publish.

It’s not that I don’t read. I read novels, even long ones like The Brothers Karamazov. I’ve pushed through dense non-fiction like Bostrom’s Superintelligence. But philosophy still feels like a different kind of difficult. Not just complex ideas, but ideas wrapped in language meant for colleagues, not curious readers. What’s strange is that older philosophers are often easier. Plato writes in dialogues. Marcus Aurelius writes short, direct meditations. Camus tells stories. Even Aristotle, who isn’t easy, feels less technical and conceptual than modern philosophers. Somewhere along the way, philosophy became something you need a PhD to parse.

Second, the topics. Some modern philosophers are online. Sam Harris and Slavoj Žižek have video content, podcasts, and interviews. That’s easier to consume than dense academic texts. But even then, I feel like they’re discussing problems that are far removed from our current struggles. Abstract debates about consciousness, ideology, simulation theory.

Meanwhile, I’m wondering: Will AI take my job? How do I stay sane when my attention is being harvested? How do I build real relationships when everything is mediated by screens?

Where’s the philosophy that speaks to that?

But it’s not just the topics. Even when philosophers are online, even when their ideas are technically accessible, something else is working against them.

The Attention Economy Destroyed Contemplation

That something else is what’s been done to us. Or more precisely, to our attention.

Even when something is genuinely thought-provoking, a documentary, a long essay, a conversation that makes you pause, we just swipe to the next thing within seconds. I’ve caught myself doing it after watching something that should have made me sit and think. Instead, I opened the app again and started scrolling. The habit is so ingrained that it bypasses intention.

Marshall McLuhan said the medium is the message. Neil Postman extended the warning to television, but it applies even more now. Our Soma from Brave New World isn’t alcohol or drugs. It’s the attention-seeking algorithms we can’t stop feeding.

Philosophy requires sustained thought, tolerance for ambiguity, and the willingness to sit with discomfort. Social media rewards hot takes, certainty, and tribal signaling. Even if a philosopher wanted to reach a broad audience today, they’d be competing with content engineered to hijack your attention. It’s not a fair fight. The platform doesn’t want you to pause and reflect. It wants you to keep scrolling.

But these algorithms aren’t the root cause. They’re a symptom of something deeper in our culture. Something that shaped the platforms, the incentives, and the way we measure value in the first place.

We Outsourced Meaning to Growth

Social media is built this way because growth is the only metric that matters. Engagement, time on platform, shareholder value. The attention economy isn’t an accident. It’s the logical endpoint of a worldview that equates meaning with scale.

Somewhere along the way, we stopped asking philosophers how to live and started asking tech CEOs and finance bros. “Move fast and break things” became a guiding principle for an entire generation. We looked to venture capitalists for wisdom about the future and to productivity influencers for advice on how to spend our days. The people building the systems became the people we trusted to explain what they meant.

Productivity became the goal in itself. Not productivity toward something, just productivity. Output. Optimization. Efficiency. We stopped asking “productive for what?” and just kept measuring.

This culture also sold us a dangerous idea: that wealth is a reflection of worth. If you’re not rich, it’s your fault. A personal failure. A lack of ambition or discipline. But this is wrong. A teacher who spends thirty years shaping young minds doesn’t earn a banker’s salary. A nurse working night shifts doesn’t get stock options. These people have an enormous impact on society, but the market doesn’t reward impact. It rewards what scales. Money became our proxy for value, but it only measures what can be captured in quarterly earnings. The things that actually hold society together, care, education, connection, are invisible to the spreadsheet.

The market knows the price of everything and the worth of nothing.

We optimized for scale without asking what we were scaling toward. And now we’re surprised that despite having more than any generation in history, so many people feel lost, burned out, and disconnected from any sense of purpose.

We replaced “What is a good life?” with “What is more?” and now we’re living with the consequences.

We Need This Now More Than Ever

Right now, we’re doing things because we can, not because we should. There’s some merit in that. Experimentation drives progress. But we’ve outsourced so much of the thinking that we’re just drifting through technological advancements without any sense of direction. No one is steering. We react to what’s new, adopt it, adapt to it, and then react to the next thing.

The last ten years should have taught us something. Cambridge Analytica showed us how easily democracy could be manipulated through data. Social media platforms optimized for engagement and ended up amplifying outrage, conspiracy theories, and polarization. More recently, AI chatbots have contributed to people taking their own lives. We’re building powerful tools without the frameworks to decide how they should be used.

We have more leverage and potential than any generation in history. AI, automation, global connectivity. The decisions we make now will shape everything that comes after. The internet, for all its flaws, went reasonably well. Social media did not. And AI is moving faster than either of them.

We desperately need to start thinking about what we must do, not just what we can do.

I want to find contemporary philosophers who are actually grappling with this. Or honestly, maybe I need to start writing about it myself.