My Collection of Rules for Life

I’m not wise enough to tell anyone in every situtation what works. These are just my rules that I’ve uncovered from my time walking this Earth with a shit-ton of annoying people. These rules speak mostly to quirks of my own personality more than anything else because I’ve been studying myself for a long time now, and I know my strengths and weaknesses, mostly, though I still do yield discoveries here and there as a work-in-progress. In other words, take them or leave them.

In no particular order, here they are my rules for life (so far):

1. Always Face the Music. For me, I never want to face negative things. I want to hide. That’s just the truth. It’s cowardly to hide, though, and cowardly to refuse to face something. When I catch myself wanting to hide, I recall this rule, and I just face it. It is always better when you face it.

2. Ignore the negative voice Maybe not always, but I’ve found that I do better and I feel better if I ignore the hyper-critical interior voice that tells me I suck. Does everybody have that voice? I don’t think so. I do, though, and he’s a real bastard, always telling me that what I’m doing is stupid, a waste of time, and that I’m going to fail. I’ve been unable to shut it off; it is persistent. That’s why I use the word ignore.

3. Use the Trichotomy of Control. Some things I control. Some things I only partially control. Some things I do not control at all. Adress only those things over which I have some measure of control, and ignore the rest. Don’t worry about what President Biden is doing. I don’t control that. Instead, worry about being productive today, getting my own shit done. That’s the idea.

4. Sleep on it Don’t make decisions quickly. Allow some time to pass before I make a decision.

5. Prefer Simplicity Get rid of things I don’t need. Think about my clothes and get things that are practical and that I like so I don’t have to think about getting dressed; it’s just automatic. I have a mirror in my shower so that I can shave in there and can cut out a bunch of extra steps, etc. I’m always suprised where I am able to make things simpler, and I find it fun to do it.

6. Want No Cars This one is kind of hard because I’m an American and cars are our thing, but cars are fucking stupid, and I can especially see this stupid trait in others, and I find it garish and goofy and I don’t want to emulate it. I saw my doctor on the road one day in a Mercedes, and I thought, yeah, for sure, he’s a doctor so of course he has to have a Mercedes; that’s in the hippocratic oath right, I think. Fucking cars, man. Cars are a waste of money. Period. Over and out. Another one I tell myself a lot: I’m unimpressed with people who are impressed by the car one drives.

7. Practice Negative Visualization.Imagine as a matter of routine how much worse things can be so that you’re more likely to live in the present and appreciate the things you have. Things can always be worse.

8. People are Talking Apes Everyone is just a talking ape. Nothing is special about them, and nothing they say matters, just like a dog barking. Don’t take any words mouthed by a talking ape to heart.

9. Women are Always Trouble Women make everything more complicated than it has to be. I’ve never met one who didn’t needlessly overcomplicate matters. They are a special class of person, never held to account, always treated with kid gloves, always afforded unearned respect for merely existing. Men get none of that, and so we can’t relate to women on the same level. They’re playing a different game, following different rules. At best, and I mean at best, all one can hope for is to break even when it comes to women. More likely she’s going to bankrupt you or otherwise corrupt you in a thousand different ways. Adam and Eve, man. Adam and Eve. Aside from my dearly-departed grandmothers, my mother, my sister, and my daughters, women in my in-group, all of my interactions with women have been a net-negative.

10. The Obstacle is the Way The obstacle in blocking your path is the indicator that that is the way forward.

11. If most people are doing it, it is probably wrong I’ve seen how people behave in groups, and I want no part of it.

12. Apply the 80/20 rule Just as a general shortcut to understanding something, you can often just break it up into an 80/20 and it’ll be close. How many people are top-notch professionals at their jobs? Probably about 20% in any given field. It’s not precise, but a general shortcut, like I said. How many divorces are filed by women versus men? Approximately 80/20.

13. Religion is Bullshit. I don’t mind religious people like I used to when I was a younger man; I’m live and let live nowadays, but I’ve always found that religious people fall into a few different categories: 1. They’re stupid 2. They charlatans and grifters. Well, that’s only two categories. That’s all I got. Basically, I’m content for the grifters to practice their grift on the stupid people; I just want no part of it, and I don’t take it seriously. Things that are real don’t depend of preachers to assert their realness. Realness is self-evident.

14. Prefer busy-ness Don’t be bored. Read. Write. Go for a walk. Etc.

15. Don’t Procrastinate If you can get it done now, get it done now.

16. Avoid Fast Food Fast food is low-quality, pumped full of fat, sugar, and salt to make it palatable. Learn to cook and prepare your meals at home as that’s more economical and you control the ingredients. If you must eat out, why not grab some fajitas at the Mexican place next door to the McSleaze. You get proteins and vegetables, all cooked to order.

17. Alcohol is Poison Figuratively and literally. I really like beer, and maybe when I get older, before I die, I’ll get back into drinking it, when it doesn’t matter anymore, but now while I’m raising kids and earning a living, alcohol can do nothing but hurt me. I miss Guinness the most. Quitting drinking, though, is one of the best decisions I ever made as it was going to destroy me. The people destroyed by alcohol are legion.

18. Try to Be Thoughtful I try to do things with mindfulness and having thought things through. This is hard to do, actually, mostly because of the limiting factor of knowledge. One can’t have perfect knowledge about things, and he often can only do his best with the information he has available to him, and he can’t know what he doesn’t know. Still, it is worth the effort to try, almost always.

19. Don’t complain to people, and don’t gossip about people. This one seems self-explanatory to me, that nothing good comes from doing either of these things. Plus, when you do this, you are making the implicit acknowledgment that other people matter to you, and they ought not matter to you at all. People are just talking apes (see rule #8).

20. Understand Science Science is corruptible, as we all saw with crystal-clear clarity during the covid “pandemic”, but that’s all the more reason to understand science because if you understand what science actually does, it is easy to spot it when it has been corrupted by bad-faith actors. Main thing here is to understand that science is concerned with what is false, not with what is true. People fail to understand that, at their peril. This preoccupation with falsifiability is what makes science the best thing humans have ever created. It corrects our natural inclination to want to be right, to see what we want to see. If I make a statement, a hypthesis, that Toyota cars are the best cars, just for example, then I apply a scientific approach and try to prove that statement false. Most people never do anything like this. They like Toyotas, and they’ll go out of their way to find information that confirms that bias, and you can never tell that person that Toyotas aren’t the best; they won’t hear it. Don’t be like that. Take your sacred cows and slaughter them.