I'm not going to go into what my philosophy is, because that's not important, but yeah I totally have one and it's the foundation of who I am. How did I arrive at it? Probably because I felt a need at a very young age that it's was necessary to have one. Like a NEED THIS TO SURVIVE need. When I was finally old enough to have my own ideas of the world like at like 8? 10?, I looked around and realized there were all these ways of being out there, all these options people could have, there was so much potential to being alive and millions of choices. I subconsciously realized that I needed both an anchor and a compass in order to make it through this experience of being alive with any chance at success. If you can see or justify any moral choice or option as being ok, how the heck do you make any progress when everything is viable? Where's your control group to measure against? How do you find your way when every path looks like it has an equal chance of success? How can you tell them apart? Anyway, these were the kind of things I was thinking and I needed to make sense of the world so I could function in it. The best way to do that was to figure out what was "true" and then measure against it.

We had a lot of different religious and spiritual books in our house and my parents were very open about explaining different paths. They didn't force us into a particular one, although they did encourage us to find something to believe in. I found something I liked that I felt could help me make sense of everything and gave me good guidelines about how to be a good person and make good choices, and took it from there.

I actively try to live up to my ideals on a daily basis. The hard part, and maybe this is for most INFJs, is that you have a really good idea of what perfection looks like, and then you know where you currently are. There's always room for improvement and there's always a way I can be better. I've given myself a task of a lifetime to achieve and it hasn't let me down or bored me yet. Do I think it's a failing that I need a system like this in order to function as a person? Not really. I have a clear idea of who I am and what I want, and something to work towards. I think I've been fair and respectful of others and like having a metric to measure against. It works for me, and probably without it I'd find a way to destroy myself :D