Yeah, I feel you on that.

It took about 20 years for my philosophy and literature degrees pay off.

I know more now, but I had to start -somewhere- even if it was hard to get the whole context.

Much of that time between putting in all that work and feeling like it was worth it was spent reading a lot of other things and amassing life experience, raising my kids, and working in unrelated professions.

However, having that context for the experiences I was getting is probably why it feels useful in retrospect.

Even though I didn't really understand Sartre or Kirkegaard or whoever (and I suspect that they don't have the best ideas all the time), having them available to me was helpful.

To me, even if I didn't totally get the context of "Pride and Prejudice" or "The Mayor of Casterbridge" or "Ulysses" or "Pamela" or "Borderlands/La Frontera" or "The Sun Also Rises":

a) knowing that these were things people do deeply explore was helpful and

b) the little bits that did resonate have stayed with me.

Further, it's been very useful to re-visit these texts as I've gotten older has been supremely interesting.

So yeah, education is wasted on the young and all but it set me up well.

As a not-super-old 48-year-old with adult children, I'm quite pleased that I can review the texts from my 20s and will be able to do the same if I get to be in my 70s or 80s.