Thanks for sharing your reasons for leaving academia. It took me ten years with one foot in, one out of Philosophy, but I also left academia. Congrats on not waiting as long as I did. Like you, I found it too stuffy - there are a million unstated rules, mostly to do with class (and race and gender and all things normalized), that made it very exhausting to inhabit academia. I was always lobbing rocks at that glass pane. Anyhow, after teaching at a very liberal arts college and the most liberal of public universities, I was just over it. I'm just too outside even the most liberal of academic boxes. The good news is that there are more of more of us out here, and I hope we can find each other and support each other's philosophy projects. You can do a lot more "out here' and public philosophy is just now gaining steem, lol. I'm pretty sure you follow me on twitter, but if not, here is something for you and others interested in public philosophy: https://medium.com/@tPhilosophia/the-public-philosophy-platform-69c16991d6f1 Cheers, Dr.A