Lasting Thoughts
Jordan Peterson has had a significant impact on my life. He came into my realm at a time when was lacking direction. His work provided me a framework to build upon. This book is an expansion of many of his main ideas. He preaches the importance of taking responsibility, setting goals, self-awareness, and accepting the inevitability of catastrophe in life. He discusses how easily one can become lost in the darkness inherent in life and the importance paying attention the light for yourself and the people around you. He emphasizes the importance of being truthful with yourself and the people closest to you.
I garnered the most from Chapter 10, on maintaining romance in your relationship, because it is the most pertinent to where I find myself in life right now. It has made me question my idea of commitment, marriage, and what it takes to have a lasting, loving relationship.
How The Book Changed Me
The book reemphasized for me the importance of taking responsibility for my life and the choices I am making. It reminded me that life is paradoxically long and short, it can be filled with catastrophe and heartache, but there are things I can do to ease the suffering, both for myself and for the people I care about. I might not be able to change the world, but I can affect my world. I can aim to do as much good in my world as feasibly possible.
Most Memorable Quote
“Life is what repeats, and it is worth getting what repeats right.”
Jordan Peterson
My Notes
For reference:
The bold highlights are my own emphasis
The blue highlights are passages I found noteworthy or interesting
Rule 1: Do Not Carelessly Denigrate Social Institutions or Creative Achievement
… there is almost nothing worse than treating someone striving for competence as a tyrant in training.
Excuse the cliche, but it is necessary to walk before you can run. You may even have to crawl before you can walk. This is part of accepting your position as a beginner, at the bottom of the hierarchy you so casually, arrogantly, and self-servingly despise.
Thus, we need to bear the paradox that is involved in simultaneously respecting the walls that keep us safe and allowing in enough of what is new and changing so that our institutions remain alive and healthy. The very world depends on its stability and its dynamism on the subsuming of all our endeavors under the perfection—the sacredness—of that dual ability.
Rule 2: Imagine Who You Could Be, And Then Aim Single-Mindedly At That
Everyone has the sense, I believe that there is more to them than they have yet allowed to be realized. That potential is often obscured by poor health, misfortune, and the general tragedies and mishaps of life.
An unforgettable story captures the essence of humanity and distills, communicates, and clarifies it, bringing what we are and what we should be into focus. It speaks to us, motivating attention that inspires us to imitate. We learn to see and act in the manner of the heroes of the stories that captivate us.
— We are dormant adventures, lovers, leaders, artists, and rebels, but need to discover that we are all those things by seeing the reflection of such patterns in dramatic and literary form.
The phenomena that grips us (phenomena: from the Greek word phainesthai, “to appear, or to be brought to light”) are like lamps along a dark path: they are part of the unconscious processes devoted to integrating and furthering the development of our spirits, the furtherance of our psychological development. You do not choose what interests you. It chooses you.
It is a perilous journey, but it is the adventure of our lives. Think of pursuing someone you love: catch them or not, you change in the process. Think, as well, of the traveling you have done, or of the work you have undertaken, whether for pleasure or necessity. In all cases, you experience what is new. Sometimes that is painful; sometimes it is better than anything else that has ever happened to you. Either way, it is deeply informative.
At some point in our evolutionary and cultural history, we began to understand that human evil could rightly be considered the greatest of all snakes.
Everyone requires a story to structure their perceptions and actions in what would otherwise be the overwhelming chaos of being. Every story requires a starting place that is not good enough and an ending that is better. Nothing can be judged in the absence of that end place, that higher value.
Aim at something. Pick the best target you can currently conceptualize. Stumble toward it. Notice your errors and misconceptions along the way, face them, and correct them. Get your story straight. Past, present, future—they all matter. You need to map your path. You need to know where you were, so that you do not repeat the mistakes of the past. You need to know where you are, or you will not be able to draw a long from your starting point to your destination. You need to know where you are going, or you will drown in uncertainty, unpredictability, and chaos, and starve for hope and inspiration, For better or worse, you are on a journey. You are having that adventure—and your map better be accurate.
Aim at something profound and noble and lofty. If you can find a better path along the way, once you have started moving forward, then switch course. Be careful, though; it is not easy to discriminate between changing paths and simply giving up. (One hint: if the new path you see forward, after learning what you needed to learn along your current way, appears more challenging, then you can be reasonably sure that you are not deluding or betraying yourself when you change your mind.)
Discipline and transformation will nonetheless lead you inexorably forward. With will and luck, you will find a story that is meaningful and productive, improves itself with time, and perhaps even proves you with more than a few moments of satisfaction and joy.
— With will and luck, you will be the hero of that story, the disciplined sojourner, the creative transformer, and the benefactor of your family and broader society.
Rule 3: Do Not Hide Unwanted Things In The Fog
Do not pretend you are happy with something if you are not, and if a reasonable solution might, in principle, be negotiated. Have the damn fight. Unpleasant as it may be in the moment, it is one less straw on the camel’s back.
Life is what repeats, and it is worth getting what repeats right.
Every little problem you have every morning, afternoon, or evening with your spouse will be repeated for each of the fifteen thousand days that will make up a forty-year marriage.
— Perhaps you think (moment to moment, at least) that it is best to avoid confrontation and drift along in apparent but false peace. Make no mistake about it, however; you age as you drift, just as rapidly as you age as you strive. But you have no direction when you drift, and the probability that you will obtain what you need and want by drifting aimlessly is very low.
You cannot hit a target that you refuse to see. You cannot hit a target if you do not take aim. And, equally dangerously, in both cases: you will not accrue the advantage of aiming, but missing. You will not benefit from the learning that inevitably takes place when things do not go your way.
Success at a given endeavor often means trying, failing short, recalibrating (with the new knowledge generated painfully by the failure). and then trying again and falling short—often repeated, ad nauseam.
Best to find out what is true—best to disperse the fog—and fight out if the sharp objects you feared were lurking there are real or fantastical. And there is always the dangers that some of them are real. But it is far better to see them than to keep them occluded by the fog, because you can at least sometimes avoid the danger that you are willing to see.
We use our past effectively when it helps us repeat desirable—and avoid repeating undesirable—experiences. We want to know what happened but, more importantly, we want to know why. Why is wisdom. Why enables us to avoid making the same mistake again and again, and if we are fortunate helps us repeat our successes.
Rule 4: Notice That Opportunity Lurks Where Responsibility Has Been Abdicated
If you want to become invaluable in a workplace—in a community—just do the useful things no one else is doing. Arrive earlier and leave later than you compatriots (but do not deny yourself your life). Organize what you can see is dangerously disorganized. Work, when you are working, instead of looking like you are working.
Under reasonable circumstances, picking up the excess responsibility is an opportunity to become truly invaluable. And then, if you want to negotiate for a raise, or more autonomy—or more free time, for that matter, you can go to your boss and say,
— “Here are ten things that were crying out to be done, each of them vital, and I am now doing all of them. If you help me out a bit, I will continue. I might even improve. And everything, including your life, will improve along with me.”
— And do not forget that there is no shortage of genuinely good people who are thrilled if they can give someone useful and trustworthy a hand up. It is one of the truly altruistic pleasures of life.
It appears that the meaning that most effectively sustains life is to be found in the adoption of responsibility. When people look back on what they have accomplished, they think, if they are fortunate: “Well, I did that, and that was valuable. It was not easy. But it was worth it.”
I think that is the secret to the reason for Being itself: difficult is necessary.
People need meaning, but problems also need solving. It is very salutary, from the psychological perspective, to find something of significance—something worth sacrificing for (or to), something worth confronting and taking on. But the suffering and malevolence that characterize life are real, with the terrible consequences of the real—and out ability to solve problems by confronting them and taking them on, is also real.
— By taking responsibility, we can find a meaningful path, improve our personal lot psychologically, and make what is intolerably wrong genuinely better. Thus, we can have our cake and eat it, too.
It is by no means a good thing to be the oldest person at the frat party. it is desperation, masquerading as cool rebelliousness—and there is a touchy despondency and arrogance that goes along with it. It smacks of Neverland.
— In the same manner, the attractive potential of a directionless but talented twenty-five-year-old starts to look hopeless and pathetic at thirty, and downright past its expiration date at forty.
You must sacrifice something of your manifold potential in exchange for something real in life. Aim at something. Discipline yourself. Or suffer the consequence. And what is that consequence? All the suffering of life, with none of the meaning. Is there a better description of hell?
We are well-advised to take on challenges at precisely the rate that engages and compels alertness, and forces the development of courage, skill, and talent, and to avoid foolhardy confrontation with that which lies beyond current comprehension.
Does what you are attempting compel you forward, without being too frightening? Does it grip your interest, without crushing you? Does it eliminate the burden of time passing? Does it serve those you love and, perhaps, even bring some good to your enemies? That is responsibility. Constrain evil. Reduce suffering. Confront the possibility that manifests in front of your every second of your life with the desire to make things better, regardless of the burden you bear, regardless of life’s often apparently arbitrary unfairness and cruelty.
The ultimate question of Man is not who we are, but who we could be.
When you peer into an abyss, you see a monster. If it is a small abyss, then is a small monster. But if it is the ultimate abyss, then it is the ultimate monster. That is certainly a dragon—perhaps even the dragon of evil itself.
If you treat the person you are committed to in a manner that does not work when it is repeated across time, then you are playing a degenerating game, and you are both going to suffer terribly for it.
I have never met anyone who was satisfied when they knew they were not doing everything they should be doing. We are temporally aware creatures: We know that we are continually and inescapably playing an iterated game from which we cannot easily hide. No matter how much we wish to discount the future completely, it is part of the price we paid for being acutely self-conscious and able to conceptualize ourselves across the entire span of our lives.
— There is no escaping from the future—and when you are stuck with something and there is no escaping from it, the right attitude is to turn around voluntarily and confront it. That works.
What is the antidote to the suffering and malevolence of life? The highest possible goal. What is the prerequisite to the pursuit of the highest possible goal? Willingness to adopt the maximum degree of responsibility—and this includes the responsibilities that others disregard or neglect.
— You might object: “Why should I shoulder all that burden? It is nothing but sacrifice, hardship, and trouble.” But what makes you so sure you do not what something heavy to carry? You positively need to be occupied with something weighty, deep, profound, and difficult.
— Then, when you wake up in the middle of the night and the doubts crowd in, you have some defense: “For all my flaws, which are manifold, at least I am doing this. At least I am taking care of myself. At least I am of use to my family, and to the other people around me. At least I am moving, stumbling upward, under the load I have determined to carry.”
A bricklayer may question the utility of laying his bricks, monotonously, one after another. But perhaps he is not merely laying bricks. Maybe is building a wall. And the wall is part of a building. And the building is a cathedral. And the purpose of the cathedral is the glorification of the Highest Good.
If you have something meaningful to pursue, then you are engrossed in life. You are on a meaningful path. The most profound and reliable instinct for meaning—if not perverted by self-deceit and sin (there is no other way to state it)—manifests itself when you re on the path of maximum virtue.
Rule 5: Do Not Do What You Hate
The problem with learning styles theory? Most basically: there is simply no evidence whatsoever for its validity.
I believe that the good that people do, small though it may appear, has more to do with the good that manifests broadly in the world than people think, and I believe the same about evil. We are each more responsible for the state of the world than we believe, or would feel comfortable believing. Without careful attention, culture itself tilts toward corruption.
— And this is something to deeply consider, if you are concerned with leading a moral and careful life: if you do not object when the transgressions against your conscience are minor, why presume that you will not willfully participate when the transgressions get truly out of hand?
There are few choices in life where there is no risk on either side, and it is often necessary to contemplate the risks of staying as thoroughly as the risks of moving. I have seen many people move, sometimes after several years of strategizing, and end up in better shape, psychologically and pragmatically, after their time in the desert.
… the rejection rate for new job applications is extraordinarily high. I tell my clients to assume 50:1, so their expectations are set properly. You are going to be passed over, in many cases, for many positions for which you are qualified. But that is rarely personal.
You may also have to think through worst-case situations and discuss them with those who will be affected by your decisions. But it is once again worth realizing that staying where you should not be may be the true worst-case situation: one that drags you out and kills you slowly over decades.
— This is not a good death. even though it is slow, and there is very little in it that does not speak of the hopelessness that makes people age quickly and long for the cessation of career and, worse, life. That is no improvement.
— As the old and cruel cliche goes: If you must cut off a cat’s tail, do not do it half an inch at a time.
And there is no doubt that the road to hell, personally and socially, is paved not so much with good intentions as with the adoption of attitudes and undertaking of actions that inescapably disturb your conscience.
Rule 6: Abandon Ideology
Helping people bridge the gap between what they profoundly intuit but cannot articulate seems to be a reasonable and valuable function for a public intellectual.
Beware of intellectuals who make a monotheism out of their theories of motivation. Beware, in more technical terms, of blanket univariate (single variable) causes for diverse, complex problems. Of course, power plays a role in history, as does economics.
— But the same can be said of jealousy, love, hunger, sex, cooperation, revelation, anger, disgust, sadness, anxiety, religion, compassion, disease, technology, hatred, and chance—none of which can be definitively reduced to another.
— The attraction in doing so is, however obvious: simplicity, ease, and the illusion of mastery (which can have exceptionally useful psychological and social consequences, particularly in the short term)—and, let us not forget, the frequent discovery of a villain, or set of villains, upon which the hidden motivations for the ideology can be vented.
Ressentiment
Ressentiment—hostile resentment—occurs when individual failures or insufficient status is blamed both on the system within which that failure or lowly status occurs and then, most particularly, on the people who have achieved success and high status within that system.
Once this casual chain of thought has been accepted, all attacks on the successful can be construed as morally justified attempts at establishing justice—rather than, say, manifestations of envy or covetousness that might have traditionally been defined as shameful.
There is another typical feature of ideological pursuit: the victims supported by ideologues are always innocent (and it is sometimes true that victims are innocent), and the perpetrators are always evil (evil perpetrators are also not in short supply).
— No group guilt should be assumed—and certainly not of the multigenerational kind. It is a certain sigh of the accuser’s evil intent, and a harbinger of social catastrophe.
— To take the path of ressentiment is to risk tremendous bitterness. This is in no small part of a consequence of identifying the enemy without rather than within.
You are likely to be much more clear-minded about what is what and who is who and where blame lies once you contemplate the log in your own eye, rather than the speck in your brother’s.
Have some humility. Clean up your bedroom. Take care of your family. Follow your conscience. Straighten up your life. Find something productive and interesting to do and commit to it. When you can do all that, find a bigger problem and try to solve that if you dare.
Rule 7: Work As Hard As You Possibly Can On At Least One Thing And See What Happens
Without clear, well-defined, and noncontradictory goals, the sense of positive engagement that makes life worthwhile is very difficult to obtain. Clear goals limit and simplify the world, as well, reducing uncertainty, anxiety, shame, and the self-devouring physiological forces unleashed by stress.
Aim. Point. All this is part of maturation and discipline, and something to be properly valued. If you aim at nothing, you become plagued by everything. If you aim at nothing, you have nowhere to go, nothing to do, and nothing of high value in your life, as value requires the ranking of options and sacrifices of the lower to the higher.
It has become self-evident to me that many commitments have enduring value: those of character, love, family, friendship, and career foremost among them (and perhaps in that order).
— Those who remain unable or unwilling to establish a well-tended garden, so to speak, in any or all those domains inevitably suffer because of it.
Those who do not choose a direction are lost. It is far better to become something than to remain anything but become nothing.
— The worst decision of all is none.
A child must be sufficiently self-organizing to be desirable by his or her peers by the age of four or risk permanent social ostracism.
A child terrified into obedience or shielded from every possible chance of misbehavior is not disciplined, but abused. A child who has been disciplined properly, by contrast—by parents, other adults, and most significantly, by other children—does not battle with, defeat, and then permanently inhibit her aggression.
— Instead, she integrates it into her increasingly sophisticated game-playing ability, allowing it to feed her competitiveness and heighten her attention, and making it serve the higher purposes of her developing psyche. A well-socialized child does not, therefore, lack aggression. She just becomes extremely good at being aggressive.
The core idea is this: subjugate yourself voluntarily to a set of socially determined rules—those with some tradition in their formulation—and a unity that transcends the rules will emerge. That unity constitutes what you could be, if you concentrate on a particular goal and see it through.
If you work as hard as you can on one thing, you will change. You will start to also become one thing, instead of the clamoring multitude you once were. That one thing, developed properly, is not only the disciplined entity formed by sacrifice, commitment, and concentration. It is that which creates, destroys, and transforms discipline itself—civilization itself—by expressing its unity of personality and society.
Rule 8: Try To Make One Room In Your Home As Beautiful As Possible
If you learn to make something in your life truly beautiful—even one thing—then you have established a relationship with beauty. From there you can begin to expand that relationship out into other elements of your life and the world. That is an invitation to the divine.
If you study art (and literature and the humanities), you do it so that you can familiarize yourself with the collected wisdom of our civilization. This is a very good idea—a veritable necessity—because people have been working on how to live for a long time. What they have produced is strange but also rich beyond comparison, so why not use it as a guide? Your vision will be grander and your plans more comprehensive. You will consider other people more intelligently and completely. You will take care of yourself more effectively. You will understand the present more profoundly, rooted as it is in the past, and you will come to conclusions much more carefully.
— You will come to treat the future, as well, as a more concrete reality (because you will have developed some true sense of time) and be less likely to sacrifice it to impulsive pleasure.
Buy a piece of art. Find one that speaks to you and make the purchase. If it is a genuine artistic production, it will invade your life and change it. A real piece of art is a window into the transcendent, and you need that in your life, because you are finite and limited and bounded by your ignorance.
We live by beauty. We live by literature. We live by art. We cannot live without some connection to the divine—and beauty is divine—because in its absence life is too short, too dismal, and too tragic.
— And we must be sharp and awake and prepared so that we can survive properly, and orient the world properly, and not destroy things, including ourselves—and beauty can help us appreciate the wonder of Being and motivate us to seek gratitude when we might otherwise be prone to destructive resentment.
But having little children around and noticing their intense preoccupation with the present, and they fascination with what was directly around them, made me very conscious of the loss that accompanied maturity.
Artists are the people who stand on the frontier of the transformation of the unknown into knowledge. They make their voluntary foray into the unknown, and they take a piece of it and transform it into an image.
— They are typically starving a bit, because it is virtually impossible to be commercially successful as an artist, and that hunger is partly what motivates them (do not underestimate the utility of necessity).
Artists must be contending with something they do not understand, or they are not artists. Instead, they are posers, or romantics (often romantic failures), or narcissists, or archers (and not in the creative sense.)
— They are likely, when genuine, to be idiosyncratically and peculiarly obsessed with their intuition—possessed by it, willing to pursue it even in the face of opposition and the overwhelming likelihood of rejection, criticism, and practical and financial failure.
There is good reason that the most expensive artifacts in the world—those that are literally, or close to literally, priceless—are great works of art.
It is no wonder we keep their dangerous, magical productions locked up, framed, and apart from everything else. And if a great piece is damaged anywhere, the news spreads worldwide. We feel a tremor run through the bedrock of our culture. The dream upon which our reality depends shakes and moves. We find ourselves unnerved.
Hell is a place of drop ceilings, rusted ventilation grates, and fluorescent lights; the dismal ugliness and dreariness and general depression of spirits that results from these cost-saving features no doubt suppresses productivity far more than the cheapest of architectural tricks and the most deadening of lights save money. Everything looks like a corpse under fluorescents. Penny-wise and pound-foolish indeed.
Artistic, creative endeavor is high risk, while the probability of return is low. But the probability of exceptionally high return does exist, and creative endeavor, while dangerous and unlikely to be successful, is also absolutely vital to the transformation that enables us to keep our footing. Everything changes.
Art is exploration. Artists train people to see.
Beauty leads you back to what you have lost. Beauty reminds you what remains forever immune to cynicism. beauty beckons in a manner that straightens your aim. Beauty reminds you that there is lesser and greater value.
— Many things make life worth living: love, play, courage, gratitude, work, friendship, truth, grace, hope, virtue, and responsibility. But beauty is among the greatest of these.
Rule 9: If Old Memories Still Upset You, Write Them Down Carefully And Completely
It is a psychological truism that anything sufficiently threatening or harmful once encountered can never be forgotten if it has never been understood.
We must recollect ourselves or suffer in direct proportion to our ignorance and avoidance. We must gather everything from the past that we avoided. We must rekindle every lost opportunity. We must repent for missing the mark, meditate on our errors, acquire now what we should have acquired then, and put ourselves back together.
The humility required to clamber out of such hell exists in precise proportion to the magnitude of the unrequited errors of the past. And that is enough to send a shudder of true terror down the spine of anyone even partly awakened.
— We are not allowed, it seems, to avoid the responsibility of actualizing potential.
If something befalls us—or, perhaps worse, we engage in some act—that freezes us in terror and nauseates us to recall, we are bound by implacable fate to transform raw horror into understanding, or suffer the consequences.
Schizophrenics lose the ability to monitor themselves effectively, so unkempt clothing and damaged eyeglasses—particularly with badly smudged lenses—are telling features.
It is for such reason we are so captivated by people who can tell a story—who can share their experiences concisely and precisely, and who get to the point. The point—the moral of the story—is what they learned about who and where they were or are, and where they are going and why. Such information is irresistible to us all.
- It is how (and why) we derive wisdom from the risks taken by those before us, and who lived to tell the story: “This is what life was like then. This is what we wanted, and why. This is what we envisioned, and how we strategized, planned, and then acted. Sometimes, we succeeded and realized our aims. But too often (and this is what is crucial to a great story): here is how what we did not expect occurred, here is how we were knocked off the path, here are the tragedies we encountered and the mistakes we made—and here is how we put the world back together (or failed to do so.)”
So, you must confess, at least to yourself, and repent, at least within yourself, and you must change, because you were wrong. And you must humbly ask, and knock, and seek. And that is the great barrier to the enlightenment of which we are all capable in principle. This is not to claim the courage necessary to confront the full horrors of life is easy to muster. But the alternative is worse.
It is our destiny to transform chaos into order. If the past has not been ordered, the choice it still constitutes haunts us. There is information—vital information—resting in the memories that affect us negatively. It is as if part of the personality is still lying latent, out in the world, making itself manifest only in emotional disruption. What is traumatic but remains inexplicable indicates that the map of the world that guides our navigation is insufficient in some vital manner. It is necessary to understand the negative well enough so that it can be circumvented as we move into the future if we do not wish to remain tormented by the past.
Ch 10: Plan And Work Diligently To Maintain The Romance In Your Relationship
Why would you possibly assume that something as complex as maintaining a marriage could be managed without commitment, practice, and effort?
The person you have chosen is unlikely to be any smarter about you than you are, except in minor instances (and is in fact likely to be even more in the dark with regard to your innermost desires). Your failure to specify your desires means your unfortunate lover will have to guess what would please and displease you, and is likely to be punished in some manner for getting it wrong.
Naive people are possessed of the delusion that everyone is good, and that no one—particularly someone loved—would be motivated to care for pain and misery, either for revenge, as a consequence of blindness, or merely for the pleasure of doing so. But people who have matured enough to transcend their naïveté have learned that they can be hurt and betrayed both by themselves and at the hands of others.
Romance requires trust—and the deeper the trust, the deeper the possibility for romance.
— There will come a time in your life when you have done something you should not have done or failed to do something that you should have done. You may need advice. You may need support. You may need exactly what your partner could provide, if only you dared to allow them to help.
In a relationship where romance remains intact, truth must be king.
A marriage is a vow, and there is a reason for it. You announce jointly, publicly: “I am not going to leave you, in sickness or health, in poverty or wealth—and you are not going to leave me.” It is actually a threat: “We are not getting rid of each other, no matter what.” You are shackled together, like two angry cats at the bottom of a barrel with the lid on.
… you do no find so much as make, and if you do not know that you are in real trouble. Furthermore, if you have an escape route, there will not be enough heat generated in the chamber you find yourself jointly trapped in to catalyze the change necessary in both of you—the maturation, the development of wisdom—because maturation and development of wisdom require a certain degree of suffering, and suffering is escapable as long as there is an out.
Sometimes “I don’t know” truly means what it is supposed to mean—the person who utters the phrase is at a genuine loss—but often it means, instead: “I don’t want to talk about it, so go away and leave me alone.”
— “I don’t know” means not only “Go away and leave me alone.” It also frequently means “Why don’t you go away, do all the work necessary to figure out what is wrong, and come back and tell me—if you’re so smart,” or “It is intolerably rude of you to refuse to allow me to remain in my willful or dangerous ignorance, given that it obviously bothers me so much to think about my problems.”
- Persistence under such condition is a necessity, a terrible necessity, akin to surgery. It is difficult and painful because it takes courage and even some foolhardiness to continue a discussion when you have been told in no uncertain terms by your partner to go the hell away (or worse)
Tears are easily mistaken for the distress due to sadness, and they are very effective at bringing tenderhearted people to a dead halt as a consequence of their misplaced compassion.
— Tears, however, are just as often anger (perhaps more often) as they are sadness of distress.
Tears are an effective defense mechanism, as it takes a heart of stone to withstand them, but they tend to me the last-ditch attempt at avoidance. If you can get past tears, you can have a real conversation, but it takes a very determined interlocutor to avoid the insult and hurt generated by anger (defense one) and the pity and compassion evoked by tears (defense two).
— It requires someone who has integrated their shadow (their stubbornness, harshness, and capacity for necessary emotionless implacability) and can use it for long-term benefit. Do not confuse “nice” with “good.”
Hope, of course, can drive us through the pain of negotiation, but hope is not enough. You need desperation, as well, and that is part of the utility of “till death do us part.” You are stuck with each other, if you are serious—and if you are not serious, you are still a child. That is the point of the vow: the possibility of mutual salvation, or the closest you can manage here on Earth.
You will be tempted by avoidance, anger, and tears, or enticed to empty the trapdoor of divorce so that you will not have to face what must be faced. But your failure will want you while you are enraged, weeping, or in the process of separating, as it will in the next relationship you stumble into, with all your unsolved problems intact and your negotiating skills not improved a whit.
— You can keep the possibility of escape in the back of your mind. You can avoid the commitment of permanence. But then you cannot achieve the transformation, which might well demand everything you can possibly muster.
You could have a marriage that works. You could make it work. That is an achievement—a tangible, challenging, exceptional, and unlikely achievement.
— There are not many genuine achievements of that magnitude in life; a number as small as four is a reasonable estimate. Maybe, if you strive for it, you have established a solid marriage. That is achievement one. Because of that, you have founded a solid and reliable, honest and playful home into which you could dare bring children. Then you can have kids, and with a solid marriage, that can work out for you. That is achievement two. Then you have brought upon yourself more of the responsibility that will demand the best from you. Then you will have new relationships of the highest quality, if you are fortunate and careful. Then you will have grandchildren so that you are surrounded by new life when yours begins to slip away.
— In our culture, we live as if we are going to die at thirty. But we do not. We live a very long time, but it is also over in a flash, and it should be that you have accomplished what human beings accomplish when they live a full life, and marriage and children and grandchildren and all the trouble and heartbreak that accompanies also of that is far more than half of life. Miss it at your great peril.
Decide that you want children when you are twenty-nine or thirty, and then be unable to have them: I would not recommend that. You will not recover. We are too fragile to play around with what life might offer us.
[on cohabitation] Here is what it means: “You will do, for now, and I presume you feel the same way about me. Otherwise, we would just get married. But in the name of a common sense that neither of us possess we are going to reserve the right to swap each other out for a better option at any point.” And if you do not think that is what living together means—as a fully articulated ethical statement—see if you can format something more plausible.
- Cohabitation without the promise of permanent commitment, socially announced, ceremonially established, seriously considered, does not produce more robust marriages.
You just do have that many chances in life to have an intimate relationship work out properly. Maybe it takes you two or three years to meet the potential Mr. or Ms. Right, and then another two or three to determine if they are in fact who you think they are. That is five years. You get old a lot faster than you think you will, no matter how old you are now, and most of what you could do with your family—with marriage, children, and so forth—is from twentysomething to about thirty-five. How many good five-year chances do you therefore have? Three? Four, if you are fortunate?
Sexual romance: the adventure, pleasure, intimacy, and excitement people fantasize about experiencing, when they are feeling in need of a touch of the divine. You want that. The joys of life are rare and precious, and you do not want to forsake them without due cause.
If you set up a household with someone, you are going to have to do an awful lot of negotiation to keep both “like” and “love” alive.
If there is no template for what either of you should be doing when you live together with someone, then you are required to argue about it—or negotiate about it, if you are good at that, which you are probably not. Few people are.
If you are going to set up a household in peace with someone you love and hopefully like, and wish to continue loving and liking, you are going to have to determine in some manner who is going to do what. That is the replacement for roles. Who makes the bed? When should it be made? At what level of perfection does the bed have to be made to be mutually acceptable? And if this is not handled well, the conversation becomes counterproductive rapidly.
Whose career is going to take priority? When and why? How will the children be educated and disciplined, and by whom? Who does the cleaning? Who sets the table? Takes out the garbage? Cleans up the bathroom? How are the bank accounts set up and managed? Who shops for groceries? Clothes? Furniture? Who pays for what? Who adopts responsibility for the taxes? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Two hundred things, perhaps, to run a household properly—as complex a problem as running a business, with the additional difficulty of trying to manage it with a family member, much of it repeated daily.
Your life is, after all, mostly composed of what is repeated routinely. You either negotiate responsibility for every single one of these duties or you play push and pull forever, while you battle it out nonverbally, with stubbornness, silence, and half-hearted attempts at “cooperation.” That is not going to do your romantic situation any good. It is of vital necessity, in consequence, to place the domestic part of the household economy on firm ground.
You are required to negotiate every damned and apparently trivial detail (but the apparent triviality is a delusion): Who prepares the meals? When do they prepare the meals? What is that worth in terms of trade-offs for other tasks? How do you thank someone for conducting themselves properly in the kitchen? Who loads the dishwasher? Who does the dishes? How fast do the dishes have to be cleared off the table after you eat? Which dishes are going to be used? What are we going to eat? What role are the kids going to play? Do we sit down together? Do we have regular mealtimes? Each of these questions can become a bloody war.
The next thing you have to do … is actually talk to your partner for about ninety minutes a week, purely about practical and personal matters. “What is happening to you at work?” “What is going on, as far as you are concerned, with the kids?” “What needs to be done around the house?” “Is there anything bother you that we can address?” “What do we have to do that is necessary to keep the wold from the door next week?” Just pure, practical communication: partly because you have a story, your partner has a story, and you have a joint story. To know your story, you must tell it, and, for your partner to know it, he or she must hear it. It is necessary for that communication to happen on an ongoing basis. It does not have to be ninety minutes all at once. Maybe it can be fifteen minutes a day. But you keep those lines of pragmatic communication open, so you know where the other person is, and vice versa.
— If you dip below ninety minutes a week, you generate backlog, and your mutual story begins to unwind. At some point, that backlog is so large that you do not know who you are yourself, and you certainly do not know who you partner is, and you become mutually alienated.
I want to know what interrelationships constitute the bulk of your typical day. You wake up together, perhaps; you eat together. You do such things every day. Maybe waking up, preparing for the day, and eating make up five hours a day. That is a third of your waking time and, therefore, a third of your life. It is thirty-five hours every seven days—a whole workweek; an entire career. Get it right.
— Ask yourself and each other: How do we want these times to be structured? How can we make the morning awakening pleasant? Can we attend to each other politely and with interest and perhaps without electronic distractions while we eat? Could we make our meals delicious and the atmosphere welcoming?
Does somebody meet you at the door and indicate a certain degree of happiness to see you, or are you ignored because everyone is using their smartphones, or met with a litany of complaints? How would you like to organize that, so you do not treat the moment you arrive at home?
— There are things you do together that are mundane things; those things you do every day. But they are your whole life. You get those things right and you have established yourself much more effectively than you might realize.
Other people keep you sane. That is partly why it is a good idea to get married. Why? Well, you are half-insane, and so is your spouse (well, maybe not half—but plenty). Hopefully, however, it is not generally the same half. Now and then you meet couples who have the same weakness, and they compound that failing in each other.
— Maybe they are both too find of wine, for example, and they drift together toward alcoholism.
… you get married, if you have the courage—if you have any long-term vision and ability to vow and adopt responsibility; if you have any maturity—and you start to transform the two of you into one reasonable person. And it is even the case that participating in such a dubious process makes the two of you into one reasonable person with the possibility of some growth. So, you talk. About everything. No matter how painful. And you make peace. And you thank providence if you manage it, because strife is the default condition.
[on planning dates & sex] You think, “Oh, God. That is so cut and dried. This is so mundane and planned. That is so scheduled, predictable, bourgeois, anti-romantic, and robotic. It is demeaning and constricting, and it just turns sex into a duty. Where is the fun? Where is the spontaneity, the light jazz, cocktails, and excitement of sudden unexpected attraction? Where is the tuxedo and the little black dress?”
— That is what you expect? Even unconsciously, in your foolish fantasies? How often did you manage that when you were dating? Ever? And (remember, we are adults talking here) you want two jobs (two careers, two incomes), two kids, a reasonable standard of living—and spontaneity? And you are not about to “settle” for anything less?
— What will happen is that the absolute necessities of life will inexorably start to take priority over the desirable necessities. Maybe there is a list of ten things you will do in a day, and sex is number eleven. It is not that you do not think sex is important, but you do not ever get past number five on the list of ten.
Here is a rule: do not ever punish your partner for doing something you want them to continue doing. Particularly if it took some real courage—some reason going above and beyond the call of duty—to manage.
Arrange some dates, and then practice making those dates and going on them until you are an expert at it. Negotiate, and practice that, too. Allow yourself to become aware of what you want and need, and have the decency to let your partner in on the secret. After all, who else are you going to tell?
Do not be naive, and do not expect beauty of love to maintain itself without all-out effort on your part. Distribute the requirements of your household in a manner you both find acceptable, and do not tyrannize or subject yourself to slavery. Decide what you need to keep yourself satisfied both in bed and out of it. And maybe—just maybe—you will maintain the love of your life and you will have a friend and confidant, and this cold rock we live on at the far end of the cosmos will be a little warmer and more comforting than it would otherwise be. And you are going to need that, because rough times are always on their way, and you better have something to set against them or despair will visit and not depart.
Rule 11: Do Not Allow Yourself To Become Resentful, Deceitful, Or Arrogant
We naturally think of our lives as stories, and communicate about our experience in that same manner. We tell people automatically where we are (to set the stage) and where we are going, so that we can create the present out of the possibility that springs forth as we journey toward our destination.
— When you depict a person’s actions in the world, you describe how they perceive, evaluate, think, and act—and, when you do so, a story unfolds (and the better you are at such descriptions, the more storyline your accounts are).
If you over-protect your kids, you become the very thing from which you are trying to shelter them. Depriving them of their young lives’ necessary adventures, you weaken their characters. You become the Destroying Agent itself—the very witch that devours their autonomous consciousness.
Excess sentimentality is an illness, a developmental failure, and a curse to children and others who need our care (but not too much of it).
… as far as I am concerned, dreams are statements from nature. It is not so much that we create them. They manifest themselves to us. I have never seen a dream present something I believed to be untrue. I also do not believe—contra Freud—that dreams attempt to disguise what they mean. They are, instead, an earlier part of the process by which fully developed thoughts come to be born, as they certainly do not just appear magically out of nowhere. We must confront the unknown, as such—the great Dragon of Chaos or the Terrible Queen—and we do not know how to do it, to begin with. The dream serves as the first cognitive step—in the wake of basic emotional, motivational, and bodily reactions such as fear of curiosity or freezing.
- The dream is the birthplace of the thought, and often of the thought that does not come easily to the conscious mind. It is not hiding anything; it is just not very good at being clear (although that certainly does not mean it cannot be profound).
We should always have enough sense to keep in mind, for example, that a great predator lurks beneath the thin ice of our constructed realities.
We have a responsibility to ensure that [hierarchical structures] do not become radically unfair and corrupt and begin to distribute their reward on the basis of power or unmeritocratic privilege instead of competence. We must attend to them constantly and adjust them carefully so they remain sufficiently stable and appropriately dynamic. That is a fundamental part of our roles and responsibilities as persons aiming courageously at the good.
… you are stuck with yourself, too, and that is no picnic. You procrastinate, you are lazy, you lie, and you do vicious things to yourself and others. It is no wonder you feel like a victim, given what is arrayed against you: chaos, the truth force of nature, the tyranny of culture, and the malevolence of your own nature.
— Life contains no shortage of fundamental brutality.
I think it is reasonable to posit that it is often the people who have had too easy a time—who have been pampered and elevated falsely in their self-esteem—who adopt the role of victim and the mien of resentment.
It is often the case that if something bad happens to you, you should ask yourself if there is something that you have done in the past that has increased the probability of the terrible event—as we have discussed at length—because it is possible that you have something to learn that would decrease the chances of its recurrence. But often that is not at all what we are doing.
The fact that unfortunate things are happening or are going to happen to you is built into the structure of reality itself. There is no doubt that awful things happen, but there is an element of true randomness about them.
— it can be of great utility to realize that each of the negatives that characterize human existence are balanced, in principle, by their positive counterpart.
It is unbelievable how strong and courageous people can become. It is miraculous what sort of load people can bear when they take it on voluntarily. I know we cannot have an infinite capacity for that, but I also believe that it is in some sense unlimited. I think the more voluntary confrontation is practiced, the more can be borne. I do not know what the upper limit is for that.
If you confront the suffering and malevolence, and if you do that truthfully and courageously, you are stronger, your family is stronger, and the world is a better place. The alternative is resentment, and that makes everything worse.
If you take your turn at the difficult tasks, people learn to trust you, you learn to trust yourself, and you get better at doing difficult things. All of that is good. If you leave all that undone, you will find yourself in the same position as the child whose parents insisted upon doing everything for him or her: bereft of the capacity to thrive in the face of the difficulties/challenges of life.
— And those who avoid their destiny by standing back when asked to step forward also deprive everyone else of the advantages that may have come their way had the person who took the easy way instead determined to be all they could be.
The connection between deception and the deepest of orientating instincts can be profitably comprehended in light of that.
— If you understand that deception corrupts and distorts the function of the most fundamental instinct that guides you through the difficulties of life, that prospect should scare you enough so that you remind careful in what you say and do.
If you deceive (particularly yourself), if you lie, then you begin to warp the mechanisms guiding the instinct that orients you. That instinct is an unconscious guide, so it works underneath your cognitive apparatus, especially once it has become habitual.
There is little more terrifying than the possibility that you could come to a crisis point in your life when you need every faculty you possess, at that moment, to make the decision properly, only to find you have pathologized yourself with deceit and can no longer rely on your judgment. Good luck to you, because nothing but luck will serve to see you.
How much better could things become if we all avoided the temptation to actively or passively warp the structure of existence; if we replaced anger with the vicissitudes of Being with gratitude and truth?
Rule 12: Be Grateful In Spite Of Your Suffering
If you confront the limitations of life courageously, that proves you with a certain psychological purpose that serves as an antidote to the suffering. The fact of your voluntary focus on the abyss, so to speak, indicates to yourself at the deepest of levels that you are capable of taking on without avoidance the difficulties of existence and the responsibility attendant upon that.
If you act nobly—a word that is rarely used now, unfortunately—in the face of suffering, you can work practically and effectively to ameliorate and rectify your own and other people’s misery, as such. You can make the material world—the real world—better (or at least stop it from getting worse).
I do not believe you can be appropriately grateful or thankful of what good you have and for what evil has not befallen you until you have some profound and even terrifying self of the weight of existence.
- You cannot properly appreciate what you have unless you have some sense not only of how terrible things could be, but of how terrible it is likely for things to be, given how easy it is for things to be so. That is something that is very much worth knowing.
If you fail to understand evil, then you have laid yourself bare to it. You are susceptible to its effects, or its will. If you ever encounter someone who is malevolent, they have control over you in precise proportion to the extent that you are unwilling or unable to understand them. Thus, you look in dark places to protect yourself, in case the darkness ever appears, as well as to dine the light. There is real utility in that.
The human race has been dealing with loss and death forever. We are the descendants of those who could manage it. That capability is within us, grim as the task may seem.
To collapse in the aftermath of a tragic loss is therefore more accurately a betrayal of the person who has died, instead of a tribute, as it multiplies the effect of that mortal catastrophe. It takes a dying person of narcissistic selfishness to wish endless grief on their loved ones.
— Strength in the face of death is better for the person who is dying and for those who remain living alike. There are family members who are suffering because of their loss who need taking care of, and who may be too old and infirm and otherwise troubled to cope with the situation properly.
To be grateful to your society is to remind yourself that you are the beneficiary of tremendous effort on the part of those who predeceased us, and left this amazing framework of social structure, ritual, culture, art, technology, power, water, and sanitation so that our lives could be better than theirs.
The temptation to become embittered is great and real. It requires a genuine moral effort not to take that path, assuming that you are not—or are no longer—naive. That gratitude associated with that state of Being is predicated on ignorance and inexperience. That is not virtue.
- Thus if you are attentive and awake, and you can see the structure of the world, bitterness and resentment beckon as a viable response. Then you might ask yourself, “Well, why not walk down that dark path?” It seems to me that the answer to that, to state it again, is courage: the courage to decide “No, that is not for me, despite the reasons I may have for being tempted in that direction,” and to decide, instead, “Despite the burden of my awake mortality, I am going to work for the good of the world.”
You are going to work to make things better for yourself, as if you are someone you are responsible for helping. You are going to do the same thing for your family and the broader community. You are going to strive toward the harmony that could manifest itself at all those levels, despite the fact that you can see the flawed and damaged substructure of things, and have had your vision damaged in consequence.
There is a deep part of us that makes the decision, when we grieve for someone we have lost, that their existence was worthwhile, despite it all. Maybe that is a reflection of an even more fundamental decision: Being itself is worth having, despite it all. Gratitude is therefore the process of consciously and courageously attempting thankfulness in the face of the catastrophe of life.
- Maybe that is what we are trying to do when we meet with our families during a holiday, wedding, or funeral. Those are often contentious and difficult affairs. We face a paradoxical, demanding tension. We bring people that we know and love close to us; we are pleased at their existence and their proximity, but also wish they could be more. We are inevitably disappointed in each other, and in ourselves, as well.
In any familial gathering, there is tension between the warmth you feel and the bonding of memory and shared experience, and the sorrow inevitably accompanying that. You see some relatives who are in a counterproductive stasis, or wandering down a path that is not good for them.
- You see others aging, losing their vitality and health (and that sigh interferes with and disrupts your memories of their more powerful and youthful selves: a dual loss, then, of present and past). That is all painful to perceive. But the fundamental conclusion, despite all that, is that ”It is good that we are all together and able to share a meal, and to see and talk to each other, and to note that we are all here and facing this celebration or difficulty together.” And everyone hopes that “perhaps if we pull together, we can manage this properly.”
- And so you make the same fundamental decision, when you join communally with your people, that you make when you grieve: “Despite everything, it is good that we are together, and that we have one another.” That is something truly positive.
There is an undeniable vulnerability around children that wakes you up and makes you very conscious of the desire to protect them, but also the desire to foster their autonomy and push them out in the world, because that is how you strengthen them. It is also a vulnerability that can make you angry at life because of its fragility, and lead you to curse the fate that joins the two together.
- When I think about my parents, the same thing comes to mind. They are getting old. As people get older, in some sense, you see them crystallize into the people that they are. My father and my mother both have a decided character. They were who they were in their fifties, and now they are perhaps even more so. They have their limitations and their advantages (and it is even the case that the latter are often integrally necessary to the former).
So, you might love people despite their limitations, but you also love them because of their limitations. That is something very much worth understanding.
Coda
I hope you are surrounded by people you love and who love you in turn. I hope you can rise to the challenge presented by our current circumstances, and that we all might have the good fortune to eventually turn our attention to rebuilding the world after the deluge.
Notes
A word of advice for anyone seeking mental help in a large city clinic, where the psychiatrist seeing you might take fifteen minutes to assess your life and determine the nature of your illness: do no causally mention any odd experiences of beliefs. You may well live to regret it.
It has been known for decades, explicitly (and forever, implicitly) that self-initiated confrontation with what is fingering or unknown is frequently curative. The standard treatment for phobias and anxiety is, therefore, exposure to what is feared. That treatment is effective—but the exposure must be voluntary.
New Words:
purloin – steal
ameliorating – make (something bad or unsatisfactory) better
denizens – an inhabitant of a particular place
perspicacity – the quality of having a ready insight into things
precocious – developing abilities quicker than expected
dynamism – the theory that phenomena of matter or mind are due to the action of forces rather than to motion or matter
subsuming – absorb something in something else
edifices – a complex system of beliefs
pyrrhic – won at too great a cost
vicissitudes – change of fortune
concatenation – a series of interconnected things
insuperable – impossible to overcome
sequestration – take forcible possession of something
fructifying – make fruitful or productive
veldt – open grassland in Africa
actuarial – calculating insurance risks
inculcation – instil by persistent instruction
prognostication – predicting the future
licentious – unprincipled in sexual manners
dekulakization – soviet killing of peasants
baroque – fancy European society 17th 18th centuries
pareto distribution – distribution of wealth. rich richer, poor poorer.
cacophony – harsh sounds
unidimensional – having one dimension
canonical – ordered by canon law
untrammelled – no restricted of hampered
equivocal – open to more than one interpretation
quotidian – occurring every day
protestations – strong response to doubt or accusation
ignominy – public shame
salutary – beneficial
consternation – dismay with something unexpected
rapine – violent seizure of someone’s property
rube – a country bumpkin
sojourn – a temporary stay
vociferously – in a loud and forceful manner
strictures – criticism causing guilt
modicum – small quantity of something valuable
mien – a person’s appearance or manner
delineate – describe or portray precisely
prurient – obscene or sexual interests
subjugation – bringing someone or some thing under control
specious – plausible but wrong
interminable – seemingly endless
acrimony – bitterness
bereft – deprived of or lacking
wend – meander in a particular direction
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