A couple of thoughts:
1) Philosophy saved my life. I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown before discovering serious rigorous philosophy at my university. I quite literally might have died face-down in a ditch by now without it. The primary benefits were twofold. First, it let me know that I was not alone in having the sorts of serious philosophical concerns and thoughts that dominated my mental life. Second, it allowed me to converse with the greatest thinkers in recorded history and learn about their responses to the same problems I was wrestling with.
2) A lot of people get turned off to philosophy because their soft thinking gets exposed pretty quickly when held up to the light of reason. Most people blissfully wallow around in fluffy nonsense and don't want to (or lack the mental capacity to) really engage the problems with precise, rigorous thinking. (Let me explicitly state that I'm not accusing you of that, Plato.)
Philosophy is hard. Damn hard. The pursuit of truth will scare the pants off you and take you to the brink of madness if you're perceptive enough to really understand the problems, and it will make no promises of a happy ending. If you're really gonna pursue truth, you've either got to suck it up and deal with the consequences, or cop out and turn to one of the fluffy la la land fantasies that most others choose to delude themselves with.
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