I have this weird sense that there's an opportunity for some kind of "It Gets Better thing" for young philosophers

We would need to identify the sort of things that can go wrong. For example, I can identify two types of philosophic horror at the world (there might be more). One is where the world seems to have become objectively horrifying, and you can't escape from this perception, or don't want to escape from it because you believe this would require the sacrifice of your reason, values, or personality. A complementary type is where you believe the world could become infinitely better, if only everyone did X, but you're the only one who wants to do X, no-one else will support you, and in fact they try to talk you out of your ideas.

Example of the first: I know someone who believes in Many Worlds and is about to kill himself unless he can prove to himself that the worlds are "diverging" (in the jargon of Alastair Wilson) rather than "splitting". "Diverging worlds" are each self-contained, like in a single-world theory, but they can track each other for a time (i.e. the history of one will match the history of the other up to a point). "Splitting worlds" are self-explanatory - worlds that start as one and branch into many. What's so bad about the splitting worlds, he says, is that the people in this world, that you know and care about, are the ones who experience all possible outcomes, who get murdered by you in branches where you spontaneously become a killer (and add every bad thing you can think of, and can't, to the list of what happens to them). Also, distinct from this, human existence is somehow rendered meaningless because everything always happens. (I think the meaninglessness has to do with the inability to make a difference or produce outcomes, and not just the inconceivability of all possibilities being real.) In the self-contained "diverging worlds", the people you know just have one fate - their copies in the other worlds are different people - and you're saved from the horror and nihilism of the branching worlds.

Example of the second: recent LW visitor "Singularity_Utopia", who on the one hand says that an infinite perfect future of immortality and superintelligence is coming as soon as 2045, and we don't even need to work on friendliness, just focus on increasing intelligence, and that meanwhile the world could start becoming better right now if everyone embraced the knowledge of imminent "post-scarcity"... but who at the same time says on his website that his life is a living hell. I think that without a doubt this is someone whose suffering is intimately linked with the fact that they have a message of universal joy that no-one is listening to.

Now if someone proposes to be a freelance philosophical Hippocrates, they have their work cut out for them. The "victims" of these mental states tend to be very intelligent and strong-willed. Example number one thinks you could only be a psychopath to want to live in that sort of universe, so he doesn't want to solve his problem by changing his attitude towards splitting worlds; the only positive solution would be to discover that this ontology is objectively unlikely. Example number two is trying to save the world by living his life this way, so I suppose it seems supremely important to keep it up. He might be even less likely to change his ways.

So far it does seem to get better. I haven't had a good solid philosophic crisis in something like five years and I almost miss them now. Life was more exciting back then. When I have ideas that seem like they could precipitate that way now, it mostly just leaves me with a sense that I've acquired an interesting new insight that is pretty neat but increases the amount of inferential distance I have to keep track of when talking to other people.

I wonder how much of this is due to acquiring a memetic immune system or otherwise simply learning how to compartmentalize.

One important thing I've found is finding conversational partners who are willing to listen to your abstract digressions and then contribute useful insights. If you're doing everything all by yourself there is a sense in which you are like "a feral child" and you should probably try to seek out others and learn to talk with them about what's going on in your respective souls. Whiteboards help. Internet-mediated-text doesn't help nearly as much as conversation in my experience. Dialogue is a different and probably better process and the low latency and high "monkey bandwidth" are important and helpful.

Any sort of feedback seems able to break loops like these crises. It's kind of odd. I've wondered if there's a concrete empirical explanation related to neural networks and priming - the looping renders you literally unable to think of any creative objections or insights.