Chaos: Feminine(?). This is the unexpected. It happens when things don’t go to plan. “Chaos is what emerges more catastrophically when you suddenly find yourself without employment, or are betrayed by a lover.” — Nathaniel Eliason notes (referenced throughout the notes).
Walking the border: it’s tricky to walk the border of order and chaos. I guess it would come in the form of taking calculated risks instead of only sticking to calculated successes or being reckless. Or, by planning on things not going to plan. That keeps them in your domain of capabilities without trying to lock everything down.
The zone of proximal development is the border of order and chaos.
The Rules
1. Stand up straight with your shoulders back
I guess all of these rules aren’t exactly to be taken at face value. Like yes, standing straight with your shoulders back is supposed to increase your levels of serotonin and portray to the world (and yourself) that you are responsible, and are able and willing to take on the responsibilities of life.
The purpose of this section is to outline Peterson’s philosophy on life, I guess. He talks a lot about hierarchies; particularly, when people say we live in hierarchies but shouldn’t. He claims that they’re an unavoidable fact of life and human nature, and that any organized society must have hierarchies. Whether implicit or explicit (implicit as in market-defined, for example, and explicit as in elected or dictatorship etc).
The low serotonin individuals live on the bottom of the hierarchy. Or maybe that should be inverted: the people on the bottom of consequential hierarchies have low serotonin, and they display that in their everyday embodiments of Being.
“High serotonin characterizes the victor.” — Eliason’s notes.
Key concept: social connection for longevity
Those on the top of their hierarchy, if they’re secluded individuals, can be taken down by multiple ‘lesser’ individuals. This is very common and very easy. Not really sure how well this applies to the modern world but I guess it still does because it’s easy and common to plot the demise of those individuals more powerful than you. This is what regulatory industries do too, and I guess social cancel culture.
This is why it is important to maintain strong and true connections with those above and below you on hierarchies. It’s not only good for you and them personally, but for you hierarchically, because your self-portrayal (an honest one) as a ‘benevolent’ possessor of power makes normal people far less likely to despise you and plot against you secretly.
The dominant male, with his upright and confident posture, not only gets the prime real estate and easiest access to the best hunting grounds. He also gets all the girls. It is exponentially more worthwhile to be successful, if you are a lobster, and male.
The brain’s hierarchy monitoring system
Our brains have a system for tracking our positions in various hierarchies. At least, the ones that are consequential. This is most definitely an oversimplification and possibly a tangentially correct explanation with the same outputs, if that makes sense. Nonetheless, it explains why we experience emotional changes when our positions in hierarchies changes. For example, we feel more depressed when we drop in hierarchies and feel ‘on top of the world’ when we rise higher or to the top of a hierarchy. That’s serotonin and is monitored by this part of our brains.
This is why, when we are defeated, we act very much like lobsters who have lost a fight.
Regularity
It’s important to maintain regularity to not upset our brain’s internal tracking processes.
The body, with its various parts, needs to function like a well-rehearsed orchestra. Every system must play its role properly, and at exactly the right time, or noise and chaos ensue.
This doesn’t mean no change at all, live like a programmed robot. It just means that it’s important to take some ‘menial’ aspects of daily routine that are crucial to our function, like food and sleep, and lock them into a healthy and beneficial routine.
Sleep at similar times, wake up similar times, while making sure there’s enough time in between so we can get our sleep need plus maybe some excess. Eat healthy foods, especially breakfast: get a protein and fat heavy breakfast, not really carbohydrates because they get used up quickly.
So, attend carefully to your posture. Quit drooping and hunching around. Speak your mind. Put your desires forward, as if you had a right to them—at least the same right as others.Walk tall and gaze forthrightly ahead. Dare to be dangerous. Encourage the serotonin to flow plentifully through the neural pathways desperate for its calming influence.
2. Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping.
Fundamental proposition: People are better at prescribing and administering medication for their pets than for themselves.
- They are also more willing to spend normal or exorbitant amounts of money on their families medical treatment.
Is this a bad thing? Absolutely not. People should do this, but they should also treat themselves in the same way.
Most men do not meet female human standards. It is for this reason that women on dating sites rate 85 percent of men as below average in attractiveness.
Essentially, just respect yourself and treat yourself like someone you love and would therefore care for. It’ll serve you and your family/friends in the long run.
The garden of Eden (theme of using discipline to overcome self-inadequacy)
The snake in the garden is the dot of chaos within the yin yang symbol of order. Eve is temped and caved to the snakes deception, and then tells Adam to as well. Adam in the face of God grows resentful and blames Eve and then God himself for his transgressions. Men, as disciples of Adam, grow resentful when rejected by women and by the world and blame the women themselves and then God + Being.
It’s not hard to understand why people don’t feel they are worthy of their own care when this is how they feel about themselves and the world. But order and discipline lead one to do the reps as one would do the reps for a loved one- you must eat this medicine even if I have to hide it in your food: a man to his dog. But the man himself is misguided in his own mentality surrounding treating himself whereas he should treat himself as well (and disciplined) as he treats his dog.
The other theme within this rule is vision. Taking care of yourself gives you a starting point; a location on the map. From there, you can chart your path forward. Without a starting point, any map is useless.
3. Make friends with people who want the best for you.
Key concept: socially, delinquency is more pervasive than excellence.
The same thing happens when well-meaning counsellors place a delinquent teen among comparatively civilized peers. The delinquency spreads, not the stability. Down is a lot easier than up.
Take responsibility for your actions and decisions. For a number of reasons.
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It is portrayed better.
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It brings about better outcomes.
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It gives you your individual freedom and power back!
Besides, if you buy the story that everything terrible just happened on its own, with no personal responsibility on the part of the victim, you deny that person all agency in the past (and, by implication, in the present and future, as well). In this manner, you strip him or her of all power.
It’s important to choose to spend your time with people who want the best for you, truly, and who are dedicated to improvement, development, creation, and excellence. This rubs off on you, and you rub off on them. It’s not a selfish thing to do—you’re helping them, too.
When you dare aspire upward, you reveal the inadequacy of the present and the promise of the future.
4. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not who someone else was today.
No matter how good you are at something, or how you rank your accomplishments, there is someone out there who makes you look incompetent.
What you do does matter. Don’t buy into the “cheap trick of the rational mind” and also the nihilistic view that nothing matters in the long run. Technically, sure, but it’s kind of a cheap way to strip meaning out of meaningful events in life.
In a million years, who’s going to know the difference? The proper response to that statement is not, Well, then, everything is meaningless. It’s, Any idiot can choose a frame of time within which nothing matters. Talking yourself into irrelevance is not a profound critique of Being. It’s a cheap trick of the rational mind.
There are many ‘games’ to be played. We can’t be experts at them all. So, it’s all about the benchmark of comparison. If you’re an artist but comparing yourself against millionaires and billionaires, how can you expect to continue upwards and succeed? Also, small losses are necessary for long term growth. To win in the end, you have to lose a few hands along the way. The jackpot only comes to he who sits patiently through his losing hands.
The future is like the past. But there’s a crucial difference. The past is fixed, but the future—it could be better. It could be better, some precise amount—the amount that can be achieved, perhaps, in a day, with some minimal engagement.
Don’t be dissatisfied by small progress. Take it where it can be found. Even if you’re working slowly, which is totally okay, work surely and consistently because compounding rewards those with patience and skin in the game over a long period of time.
“What could I do, that I would do, to make Life a little better?”
5. Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.
One of the benefits of raising a young child is the amount of time you’re with them every day. For really young children it can be 20+ hours a day, if not even more. One of the best ways to teach a child how to behave in the way you want them to is to reward them for behavior you like.
You can teach virtually anyone anything with such an approach. First, figure out what you want. Then, watch the people around you like a hawk. Finally, whenever you see anything a bit more like what you want, swoop in (hawk, remember) and deliver a reward. Your daughter has been very reserved since she became a teenager. You wish she would talk more. That’s the target: more communicative daughter. One morning, over breakfast, she shares an anecdote about school. That’s an excellent time to pay attention. That’s the reward. Stop texting and listen. Unless you don’t want her to tell you anything ever again.
Also, parents need to be more understanding. They were once their kids; they once behaved as their kids do. It’s important for them to recognize their own faults and how those faults reflect onto their kids.
Parents should understand their own capacity to be harsh, vengeful, arrogant, resentful, angry and deceitful.
6. Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.
Have some humility. If you cannot bring peace to your household, how dare you try to rule a city?
Success makes us complacent, and many of us lack the fundamental psychological strength and competence to bring order and responsibility to our own lives.
If we cannot even do that, how can we be expected or trusted to exert ourselves over others in great numbers and impose rules on them?
Put your life and home in order before you try to criticize others or bring order to their lives. Put your own oxygen mask on first. In doing so, you will avoid many of the misguided reasons people psychoanalyze others. Projection of insecurities, etc. Make personal changes and take responsibility for your own attributes. Feel confident in that, and it will truly allow you to help others better than you ever could otherwise. Not to mention, yourself.
7. Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient.
The successful among us delay gratification. The successful among us bargain with the future. A great idea begins to emerge, taking ever-more-clearly-articulated form, in ever more-clearly-articulated stories: What’s the difference between the successful and the unsuccessful? The successful sacrifice.
This goes with the rules tell the truth, or at least, don’t lie, and be precise in your speech.
It’s best to set your vision on something meaningful, in the future. Bargain with the future, in this way, to make reality out of a vision that supports yourself, while supporting your family, while supporting your immediate community, while supporting the world. That, Peterson says, is one of the highest virtues and aims in life.
It was from this that I drew my fundamental moral conclusions. Aim up. Pay attention. Fix what you can fix. Don’t be arrogant in your knowledge. Strive for humility, because totalitarian pride manifests itself in intolerance, oppression, torture and death. Become aware of your own insufficiency—your cowardice, malevolence, resentment and hatred. Consider the murderousness of your own spirit before you dare accuse others, and before you attempt to repair the fabric of the world. Maybe it’s not the world that’s at fault. Maybe it’s you. You’ve failed to make the mark. You’ve missed the target. You’ve fallen short of the glory of God. You’ve sinned. And all of that is your contribution to the insufficiency and evil of the world. And, above all, don’t lie. Don’t lie about anything, ever. Lying leads to Hell. It was the great and the small lies of the Nazi and Communist states that produced the deaths of millions of people.
Meaning cannot be produced spontaneously. It emerges. You can make yourself open to receiving such meaning, but you cannot craft the meaning itself. It is a feeling, a clarity, a vision for the future which appears so crucial to you that the sacrifices along the way are no-brainers.
Expedience is what works in the moment. It’s sweeping things under the rug, hiding skeletons in the closet, being distrustful and unreliable. This never works in the long run.
8. Tell the truth, or at least, don’t lie.
Lies are convenient. They are a means to an end. They’re expedient, and expedience is, well, expedient. This is very attractive in the short term. It has the appearance of making your problems disappear immediately. But in fact, lies invariably make your problems worse.
Jordan discusses how he used to lie all the time, and why.
I soon came to realize that almost everything I said was untrue. I had motives for saying these things: I wanted to win arguments and gain status and impress people and get what I wanted. I was using language to bend and twist the world into delivering what I thought was necessary. But I was a fake. Realizing this, I started to practice only saying things that the internal voice would not object to. I started to practice telling the truth—or, at least, not lying. I soon learned that such a skill came in very handy when I didn’t know what to do. What should you do, when you don’t know what to do? Tell the truth.
Some key points emerge from this passage:
- Lies make you untrustworthy, unreliable, and worst of all, fake.
- Say only the things that your internal voice would not object to.
- If it’s hard to tell the truth in a situation, at the very least, don’t lie.
- Whenever you’re in a situation where you just don’t know what to do, the first solution is to tell the truth.
Lies are like deadwood in a forest, Peterson says. It serves no use. Eventually, the elements are restored and given back to the Earth in forest fires. But the artificial suppression of forest fires doesn’t prevent the deadwood from accumulating. Fires still emerge, and the deadwood burns so hot that even the soil underneath it is destroyed.
- In this case, the soil represents the foundation of one’s life. The deadwood is the lies and artificiality built upon their lives. And the forest fires are the moments when we reckon with the truth, when it stares you right in the eyes and you have no choice but to confront it.
If your life is not what it could be, try telling the truth. If you cling desperately to an ideology, or wallow in nihilism, try telling the truth. If you feel weak and rejected, and desperate, and confused, try telling the truth. In Paradise, everyone speaks the truth. That is what makes it Paradise. Tell the truth. Or, at least, don’t lie.
9. Assume the person you’re talking to knows something you don’t
Notes on this rule come from Jordan speaking on the subject in this video.
Dr. Jordan Peterson Explains 12 Rules for Life in 12 Minutes
- Recognize your own unbearable ignorance.
- There’s a lot of what you don’t know. You’re always going to be surrounded by what you don’t know.
- Be appreciative of what you don’t know because your life is almost never going to be exactly as you want it to be. There will likely always be things that can be put right, in terms of your own impact or those people around you who you care about. Given this, you should be so determined to learn what it is you don’t know at every possible opportunity.
- Even if people aren’t as articulate or seemingly wise to give off the impression of containing information you don’t have, there’s always the possibility that they tell you something you don’t know, allowing you to walk away less ignorant and corrupt than when the encounter began. Being less ignorant corrupt is always a good thing.
10. Be precise in your speech
“Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find.” Matthew 7:7
People act as if you’re a locus of voluntary voice in a world of potential. The precision of your speech, goals, aim, and expression is how you guide your voluntary voice through a world of infinite potential, and it’s necessary to precisely carve out that which you want from people and from this world.
Living up to your potential is a key concept that emerges from this chapter. Being told you’re not living up to your potential is an empowering concept. It gives you meaning, something to strive for, something to achieve. It gives you the opportunity to alleviate the expedience in your life and replace it with meaning, as explained in rule 7.
- Articulate yourself precisely. The precision of your expression allows you to extract from people and the world what you intend.
- Understand that you are a voluntary actor in a world of infinite potential. It’s your duty to be precise in your engagements with the world.
- Assume ignorance before malevolence. The “if they loved me, they would know what to do” mindset is rooted in resentment, not wisdom. Nobody has a direct pipeline to your wants and desires.
11. Don’t bother children when they’re skateboarding
This chapter is about the coddling nature of society. We coddle children and adults, nonchalantly label them as victims, and leave them worse off than if we support them in their triumph over adversity.
Children and teenagers skateboard without protective equipment not because they can’t wear protective equipment. They want to face danger, filled with adrenaline, and push themselves to their limits. They want to experience difficulty and adversity in an environment they can control. If they emerge victorious, they’ve found competence on their own. If they fail, they learn something about themselves, and will almost invariably try again.
I believe it was Jung who developed the most surgically wicked of psychoanalytic dicta: if you cannot understand why someone did something, look at the consequences and infer the motivation.
This is beautiful, and it pertains to the children skateboarding example so strongly. If a teenager skateboards on the street and gets chastised for it by their parents, perhaps that’s why they were doing it in the first place. The freedom, independence, and willingness to take on the world on their own—at least for a moment. To face adversity as an individual and try to emerge competent. Or, to fail, and to learn.
On coddling:
- When you are failing in a hierarchy, don’t criticize the hierarchy. Those at the top justify the hierarchy while those at the bottom complain about it. It’s the nature of life.
- Don’t coddle yourself, and don’t allow yourself to be coddled by a system or by those around you. Coddling strips you of your independence, power, and authority. Take responsibility for the situations you’re in and work to make them better. That’s meaning. Coddling is expedience.
12. Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street
Not only is there a light at the end of the tunnel, there is light all around you. But our tunnel vision prevents us from seeing it.
Adversity will never disappear entirely. There is no such thing as a perfectly clean break. There will always be things to deal with, from trauma to illness to day-to-day struggles.
- Don’t give power to crises by letting them infect your thoughts constantly. You’ll become exhausted. Conserve your mental and physical strength.
- Understand that you’re in a war, not a battle. Battles must be fought, won, or lost, but the war is the only thing of major consequence at the end of the day.
- Set aside time specifically to think about or sort through these crises. Don’t think about them outside of that period, as best as you can.
- See the beauty in life. So many things are miracles, especially beginning with people.
Next Steps
In some way, this book can be used to define a meaning of life in such a way.
The meaning of life is to walk the border of order and chaos while maintaining your values and supporting those you love.
Regulating Daily Menial Things — Rule 1
Take responsibility for decisions and actions — Rule 3
Compounding and small progress — Rule 4
Set yourself in order first — Rule 6
Be in harmony with your inner voice — Rule 8
Be open to receiving new information from people and the world — Rule 9
Articulate yourself with precision — Rule 10
Don’t forget about life’s beauty — Rule 12
42 Rules for Life
Jordan Peterson posted this on Twitter.
42 Rules for Life:
— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) April 4, 2022
- Tell the truth… or, at least, don’t lie.
- Truth reduces the terrible complexity of a man to the simplicity of his word. Truth is the ultimate, inexhaustible natural resource. It’s the light in the darkness.
- Do not do things that you hate.
- Watch yourself. If you see that you’re doing things that make you hate yourself, consider the cost of continuing.
- Act so that you can tell the truth about how you act.
- Stop doing things that you know are wrong, that you could stop doing. It might be a little thing. That’s fine. Stop doing it, and see what happens. You strengthen yourself.
- Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient.
- There is no faith, no courage, and no sacrifice in doing what is expedient. To have meaning in your life is better than to have what you want because you may neither know what you want, nor what you truly need.
- If you have to choose, be the one who does things instead of the one who is seen to do things.
- If you fulfill your obligations every day, you don't need to worry about the future.
- Pay attention.
- What do you do if your life isn’t in order? Pay attention. Paying attention is like watching for something you don’t know. It’s an unbelievably powerful force.
- Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you need to know.
- You want to enter into a conversation so that you come out wiser than you went in.
- Listen to them hard enough so that they will share it with you.
- The sympathetic responses during a genuine conversation indicate that the teller is valued and that the story being told is important, serious, deserving of consideration, and understandable.
- Plan and work diligently to maintain the romance in your relationship.
- Allow yourself to become aware of what you want and need, and have the decency to let your partner in on the secret. Do not expect the beauty of love to maintain itself without all-out effort on your part.
- Be careful who you share good news with.
- You want to share good news with people who will be genuinely happy for you. That’s one way you can identify those people who are on your side.
- Be careful who you share bad news with.
- You can tell a true friend bad news, and they’ll listen. They won’t derail the whole conversation about how something worse happened to them once.
- Make at least one thing better every single place you go.
- I’m on the side of the person that wants to do something positive with their life. Start by maximizing the quality of your life. Figure out how to do that in a way that’s of benefit to your relatives and community.
- Imagine who you could be, and then aim single-mindedly at that.
- Aim at something profound, noble and lofty. Pick the best target you can conceptualize. Stumble toward it. Notice your errors and misconceptions along the way, and correct them. Confront what stands in your way.
- Do not allow yourself to become arrogant or resentful.
- If you’re resentful, you’re likely not standing up for yourself sufficiently, or someone is legitimately treading on your territory. You need to do something about that. Or live with the consequences.
- Try to make one room in your house as beautiful as possible.
- The world presents itself as a series of puzzles. Some of which you’re capable of solving and some of which you’re not. If you want to change the world, you start with yourself and work outward.
- Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.
- The people you compare yourself to you don't know very well. You see a shiny outside but not the reality of their life. Be less concerned with other people's actions. You have plenty to do yourself
- Work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens.
- You will change. You will start to become one thing, instead of the clamoring multitude you once were. It is far better to become something than to remain anything but become nothing.
- If old memories still make you cry, write them down carefully and completely.
- If you're obsessed with memories of the past (most of them negative), there's a lot of you stuck in the past. Many people have parts of them that are stuck in some traumatic childhood experience.
- Maintain your connections with people.
- There is no evidence that the importance of friendship declines in any manner with age.
- Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or artistic achievement.
- “We don’t need to get married. We don’t need a piece of paper.” That’s the depth of thought you put into it? You’re not going to mark the occasion with conscious awareness and social celebration?
- Treat yourself as if you were someone that you are responsible for helping.
- You have a vital role to play in the unfolding destiny of the world. You should take care of, help, and be good to yourself the same way you take care of, help, and be good to someone you love.
- Ask someone to do you a small favor so that he or she can ask you to do one in the future.
- You don't obsessively keep track of who owes what, when, and why. That's a sign of a degenerating relationship. You do what you can for them, and they do what they can for you.
- Make friends with people who want the best for you.
- You have an ethical responsibility to surround yourself with people who have the courage and faith, and wisdom to wish you well when you've done something good. And to stop you when you're doing something destructive.
- Do not try to rescue someone who does not want to be rescued.
- It's a very dangerous activity, and it can easily be counterproductive. The probability that they're going to take you down, compared to you elevating them, is very, very high.
- And be very careful about rescuing someone who does.
- Nothing well done is insignificant.
- Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.
- The world is harsh. Should you criticize it? Not until you put yourself together. You have to bring everything you can to bear on your problems before you have any right to stand in judgment about Being itself.
- Dress like the person you want to be.
- Be precise in your speech.
- Let's say that you're having a rough patch in your relationship and you don't know why. The issue is unnamable. Is it real? Well, yes, it's manifesting itself in a physiological discomfort. Then you talk about it, name it, and it goes from this blurry thing into a little monster. It's this precision that enables you to specify it. Now you can do something about it (it's little, at least) if you can admit to it.
- Stand up straight with your shoulders back.
- To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life with eyes wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order.
- Don’t avoid something frightening if it stands in your way–and don’t do unnecessarily dangerous things.
- The gradual exposure to what you’re afraid of is curative. Confront the world forthrightly and expose yourself courageously to things you’re afraid of. Life will improve.
- Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.
- Do not transform your wife into a maid.
- Do not hide unwanted things in the fog.
- There will be times in your life when it will take everything you have to face what is in front of you, instead of hiding away from a truth so terrible that the only thing worse is the falsehood you long to replace it with.
- Notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated.
- You positively need to be occupied with something weighty, deep, profound, and difficult. What would your life be like if you made use of all the potential that you were offered?
- Read something written by someone great.
- Carl Jung had an idea that part of personality development is to understand your shadow, the parts of you that you don't want to admit to. You can learn about your shadow by reading history. A book isn't paper; it's a portal.
- Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street.
- When things are not good and hard, you get these little moments where a little bit of possibility still shines through. You’ve got to take those moments when you get them.
- Do not bother children when they are skateboarding.
- They jump in the air, grab their skateboard, balance on the rail, and slide for 20 feet. Children are practicing being courageous. They're practicing mastering something in the face of danger.
- Don’t let bullies get away with it.
- I usually use a rule of three: if we interact and you do something that I find disruptive, I'll note it. If you do it again, I think, "That probably wasn't merely a situation." I'll leave it be because that's still not enough evidence. If you do it a third time, then I'll say, "Hey, I just noticed this. Not only did it happen, but it happened here. And it happened here. So there's something going on here. I'm not ignoring it."
- Write a letter to the government if you see something that needs fixing—and propose a solution.
- Remember that what you do not yet know is more important than what you already know.
- It is much better to make friends with what you do not know than with what you do know, as there is an infinite supply of the former but a finite stock of the latter.
- Be grateful in spite of your suffering.
- There’s some real utility in gratitude. Gratitude is the process of consciously and courageously attempting thankfulness in the face of the catastrophe of life.