Many people are better at filling prescriptions for their dogs than themselves.Rule 2: Take care of yourself, the way you would take care of someone else. Fix your posture to get others to treat you better, which will make you feel better and stand tall, thus kicking off a virtuous cycle.(This can be reinforced in serotonin signaling, related to depression) If you slouch, you convey defeat and low status to others they will then treat you poorly, which will reinforce your status.If others denigrate you, you lower your internal status. If others kowtow to you, you elevate your own impression of status. How you see others, and how others treat you, affect how you view yourself. There is a part of your brain that is constantly monitoring signals to figure out your position in society.The 12 Rules for Life List Rule 1: Fix your posture. The rest of this guide clarifies the 12 Rules for Life list, with themes of individual responsibility, being truthful to yourself, and defining your own meaning for life. That this book has hit such a chord support the first point, that most people crave order and structure. If we lived properly as the above, we would be resistant to the pains of existence and to the enticing lures of empty ideologies promising safety.This just makes children unprepared to deal with suffering when they run into it. Overprotective adults avoid discussing suffering with their children, with the hope that it will protect them from it.Your goal is to make progress to avoid suffering. In other words, push yourself to the limit of your ability and challenge yourself. Walk the line between order and chaos, where life is stable enough but also unpredictable enough to provoke personal growth.If everyone did this, many society-level problems would be solved. Don’t worry about other problems – fix your own first. Take responsibility for your own life.
It also rejects thousands of years of development of virtue and how to live properly.Īs a solution, in his 12 Rules for Life list, Peterson focuses on individual responsibility. Moral relativism tolerates all ideas to avoid being “judgmental,” and prevents adults from telling young people how to live. In contrast, he rejects the ambiguity of moral relativism, the idea that good and evil are subjective opinion and that every belief has its own truth. In 12 Rules for Life, Peterson argues that there is a right and wrong way to conduct your life. In the absence of clear rules and a moral compass, people are prone to nihilism, existential angst, and misery.
There is no scientific code of ethics that inherited the stabilizing role of religion. For much of history this function was served by religion, with rules handed down by gods and supernatural surveillance of behavior.īut take away religion, and a void remains. Most humans crave order and meaning in their existence, to deal with the terrifying uncertainty of the world. Learn the key points of the 12 Rules for Life rule list, and get a summary of each of the 12 Rules below. The key point: individual responsibility. Famous author Jordan Peterson lays out 12 simple rules on how to conduct your life.
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Shortform has the world's best summaries of books you should be reading. This article is an excerpt from the Shortform summary of "12 Rules for Life" by Jordan Peterson.