As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation—or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind’s wings should have grown.
(Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It? )
Reading Freely 
I’m definitely a ‘Build Your Own’ philosophy kind of person…. A bit of Greek here, a bit of Roman there, a bit of post-Enlightenment thought here & there….. All very modular in the end. Essentially whatever works for you. I’ve never been the kind of person to accept any Philosophy wholesale…
My own worldview is fairly sedimentary, too, but it’s part of why this quotation resonates with me — I’m frequently conflicted between some of my values and ideas. (I dislike consumerism, but I love how trade brings people together; I want to practice simple living, but I love the promise of tech; I’m a skeptic who would have probably in a monk in another age; I despair of society unraveling but it’s so rotten that I want to drop out of it, in effect helping it unravel further. And then I read Rand, and — there’s strength, clarity, forceful rejection of despair. )
To be brutally honest, the world we inhabit today disgusts me is so many ways. If I give it a moments thought I can’t help but think, deep in my bones, that it just shouldn’t be like this and that something is fundamentally wrong with the world. I can completely understand why some early thinkers thought that the world had been created by an evil god or it was designed as a prison. I think it’s the shallowness of things, the fakeness and hypocrisy of it all….. But maybe that’s just me! [grin]