12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

require rules, standards, values—alone and together. We’re pack animals, beasts of burden. We must bear a load, to justify our miserable existence. We require routine and tradition. That’s order.

Look for your inspiration to the victorious lobster, with its 350 million years of practical wisdom. Stand up straight, with your shoulders back.

death and social humiliation constituting the two most basic fears

but we almost always agreed on the questions.

One day, however, not so long ago, we woke up. We were already doing, but we started noticing what we were doing.

“If there is a rifle hanging on the wall in act one, it must be fired in the next act. Otherwise it has no business being there

A single leaf can be plucked from a branch. It can be perceived, briefly, as a single, self-contained entity—but that perception misleads more than clarifies. In a few weeks, the leaf will crumble and dissolve. It would not have been there at all, without the tree. It cannot continue to exist, in the absence of the tree. This is the position of our laptops in relation to the world.

There is very little difference between the capacity for mayhem and destruction, integrated, and strength of character.

Beavers build dams. They do so because they are beavers, and beavers build dams.

And perhaps because, as unfamiliar and strange as it sounds, in the deepest part of our psyche, we all want to be judged.