You can probably recall admiring something you would never join
You can probably recall finding a tradition genuinely admirable — its ethics, its practice, what it does for people — and having no intention of participating. Neptune in Aquarius in the 9th house does that: belief arrives as an intellectual position rather than as a membership.
Take the network-shaped longing as the background tone of a birth era. The 9th house is the local reading, and local readings differ — yours falls on belief and meaning, which is why the ideal system you keep designing is a moral one rather than a technical one.
An account of the world that anybody could check
What you want is a framework built from first principles, transparent, requiring no authority and no membership: something a reasonable stranger could verify. It is an admirable specification and almost nothing that sustains people over a lifetime meets it. The alternative is not credulity; it is accepting that some things are only available from inside.
They hear the questioning as contempt for what they hold
Your interest in taking apart a framework is genuine curiosity and it arrives, to somebody who lives by that framework, as an attack on their life. The difference is entirely invisible from their side. Say what you respect about it first and mean it. Where you cannot find anything to respect, the conversation is not one you should be having.
Understanding it accepted in place of being in it
You know a great deal about practices and communities you have never belonged to, and the knowledge is accurate and it is missing the only part that matters, which is what happens to a person who does the thing for years. That data is only available by participation. Everything else you have is a report from outside.
Belong to something for a year, without editing it
Choose one community or practice and participate fully for twelve months: attend, contribute, follow the form even where you would design it differently. Suspend the redesigning for the duration. What you learn is not available any other way, and the discomfort of not being able to improve it is itself the material.
You want an account of things that would hold for everybody
The framework you are looking for has to work regardless of who you are, where you were born, or what you were raised inside — nothing local, nothing that depends on being you. That is a serious philosophical demand and it rules out most of what people actually live by. Notice what you are excluding, since some of it may be what you are missing.
You are drawn to work at the edge of what is settled
Fields in transition, disciplines being reconsidered, questions where the answer is not yet agreed — this is where your attention is most alive and where your contribution is largest. Settled work bores you within a year. Choose for the open question rather than for the established field, since that is what actually keeps you in the room.
You have opinions in common with people you never see
A good deal of your intellectual life happens with people who are not present: writers, correspondents, communities at a distance. It is real company and it asks nothing of you physically. Find one group that meets in person about something you care about. The friction of actual people is the part your ideas have not been tested against.
You want somebody who thinks, and you resist being formed by them
A partner who can genuinely change your mind is what you say you want and also what you guard against, because being reshaped by another person feels like a loss of independence. Let one person actually change your view about something, visibly, and say so. It is the closest thing to intimacy available in the register you operate in.
You will hold a theory about your body longer than the evidence supports
Having reasoned your way to a position about how your health works, you keep it through evidence that contradicts it, because abandoning it would mean accepting an account you did not derive. Set a review date and check the theory against what actually happened. Your reasoning is good; the input has been thin.