That's fair. Can't say you're wrong either. We yearn for meaning, whether its under the guise of rational discourse or the comfort of faith

Welcome to phil! I agree with all the advice about reading histories of philosophy, but here's a personal recommendation: Most phil is written in a more or less didactic style. You'll find premises, arguments, refutations . . . and all that is absolutely necessary for critical thinking. But also make time for three philosophers, great ones, who didn't write that way at all: Plato, Kierkegaard, and late Wittgenstein. If you read around in these three, you'll have your eyes opened to an entirely different sense of what "writing philosophy" can be.

Start by finding some question you really want answered. Then start reading around that. Make notes every time some fact or thought strikes you as somehow feeling key to the question you have in mind, you are just not quite sure how. Then as you start to accumulate a decent collection of these snippets – stumbled across all most randomly as you sample widely – begin to sort the collection into its emerging patterns. — apokrisis

I think this is excellent advice. I would add: When you encounter a point of view that seems, on first reading, just nonsense, immediately stop and try to enter that "nonsensical" point of view. Why would this (presumably respected and published) philosopher write such a thing? What could they be thinking, meaning? Don't move on until you feel you've made progress in understanding this alien way of thinking. I believe the single biggest error that newbie/amateur philosophers make is to fail to read generously and curiously. This leads to the kind of autodidacticism you've been warned about, and reinforces our natural unfortunate tendency to be dismissive of people we disagree with, without actually understanding how or why the disagreement comes about.