One of the most important parts of growing up is creating a sense of personal identity through such things as deciding what music you want to listen to, friends you want to hang out with, and the worldviews you want to espouse. Ordinarily this process is a long and arduous one, beginning in early middle school up until your mid-twenties, even a little longer if you really lack direction in life. This period of your life is usually characterized by lots of awkward social situations, poor life choices, and embarrassing memories that, thanks to the Internet, will be preserved forever.

Now, what if I told you there was a way to avoid all this drama and wasted time? Well, hold onto your hat because that’s exactly what I’m going to do. The key to finding yourself lies in one word, philosophy. Now I know what you are thinking, “How can philosophy help me? It’s just a bunch of old dead white guys talking about nonsense.” I get what you are saying, on its head philosophy seems rather daunting to confront especially if you are trying to read it (looking at you Kant). But I assure you, once you manage to sift through the dense prose (or watch a bunch of YouTube videos), and get to the actual concepts, philosophy starts to prove its worth.

The strength of philosophy is that it forces you to confront the big questions of life all at once in a centralized manner, rather than the million small ways we do over our lifetime. It makes you reason through your beliefs and separate what you have just picked up from people around you (i.e. your parents, friends teachers, etc.) versus what you truly believe. It may be you find nothing worth challenging and you strengthen your beliefs, or you could create a radically different worldview. That’s the beauty of philosophy; it can do all of this and more without going through some awkward Goth phase or hanging out for two years with ‘friends’ you come to hate.

Even if you are a person who feels secure in who they are, philosophy can create a much more solid foundation for you to rest on. I can vouch for this personally after taking a philosophy class this year. I had always known that I was a liberal and had an idea of the exact beliefs that led me to that viewpoint, but I never quite had a way to tie it all together in a satisfying manner. Until my social and political philosophy class. As we went over lessons and began to focus on specific philosophies, I began to see the things that I had always ardently believed come together into a more unified set of beliefs and more importantly, I saw the underlying explanation for it all. Suddenly my worldview began to take on a more solidified structure. It finally made sense why I could believe in such things as a progressive tax rate and military draft beyond some arbitrary “I just think it’s right.” I came away from that class with a stronger understanding of what I believed and a more articulate way to express what was, before, a collection of feelings and scattered thoughts. It’s this experience that prescribes philosophy as the fast track to self-discovery.

So when you are assigned that philosophy reading, maybe instead of approaching it with dread and disinterest, try and pay attention to what you are learning. Who knows? It might do you some good.