I'm not a fan of Ayn Rand, but I have read some insightful statements from her over the years. The one that has stuck with me the most is the idea that if you d

I'm not a fan of Ayn Rand, but I have read some insightful statements from her over the years. The one that has stuck with me the most is the idea that if you don't have a conscious, clearly defined philosophy, then your actions are still dictated by SOME philosophy. You just don't know what it is because you've never articulated it or thought critically about it. It is almost certainly a mishmash of biases and contradictions. By articulating your own philosophy (i.e., just putting it into words), you gain the ability to critically reason about it, better understand your own feelings and actions, and hopefully fix the ways in which that unarticulated philosophy was broken. I'm sure there are lots of other people who are a lot smarter than I am and don't need to articulate things in order to reason about them, but I am not one of those people.