I enjoy Richard Rorty's writings along similar lines, like in his essay "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids":

"I decided to major in philosophy. I figured that if I became a philosopher I might get to the top of Plato's 'divided line' - the place 'beyond hypotheses' where the full sunshine of Truth irradiates the purified soul of the wise and good: an Elysian field dotted with immaterial orchids. It seemed obvious to me that getting to such a place was what everybody with any brains really wanted."

"The more philosophers I read, the clearer it seemed that each of them could carry their views back to first principles which were incompatible with the first principles of their opponents, and that none of them ever got to that fabled place 'beyond hypotheses'."

"When I am asked (as, alas, I often am) what I take contemporary philosophy's 'mission' or 'task' to be, I get tonguetied. The best I can do is to stammer that we philosophy professors are people who have a certain familiarity with a certain intellectual tradition, as chemists have a certain familiarity with what happens when you mix various substances together."

"Despite my relatively early disillusionment with Platonism, I am very glad that I spent all those years reading philosophy books. For I learned something that still seems very important: to distrust the intellectual snobbery which originally led me to read them. If I had not read all those books, I might never have been able to stop looking for what Derrida calls 'a full presence beyond the reach of play', for a luminous, self-justifying, self-sufficient synoptic vision."

I guess in math they found it just gets more complex, as you go deeper? eventually you need new tools, upon new tools? Is this like philosophy? you just find you need more tools? I'm no expert. And that's why I'm putting question marks around.

Often in maths you build higher and higher abstractions until you've finally succeeded in an abstraction high enough to encode the very axioms you started with, at which point you're back where you started, if a little wiser for the journey.

At this point I'm fairly sure going deeper (or higher) in mathematics is a dead end, you should instead try to go sideways, to the 'ground level' questions that aren't answered yet, or to the questions that aren't yet mathematical.

Great insight. and thanks for taking the time to clear things

I was likely butchering the Godel incompleteness theorem.

>What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc.

Some would argue that philosophy has never helped with any ordinary question (only purporting to), but has made contributions to society through logic's support of math.