Peterson: 12 Rules for Life

Interesting: Aristotle defined vice as the ways of behaving least conducive to happiness and virtue as the ways of behaving most conducive to happiness. 

Dreams shed light on the dim places where reason has yet to voyage. 

How could the world be freed from conflict and psychological/social dissolution?

Through elevation and development of the individual, through the willingness of everyone to shoulder the burden of Being and to take the heroic path. 

When the aristocracy catches a cold, the working class dies of pneumonia. 

We were struggling for position before we had skin, or hands, or lungs, or bones. Dominance hierarchies are older than trees. 

The part of our brain that tracks our position in the dominance hierarchy is therefore exceptionally ancient and fundamental. 

It is a master control system, modulating our perceptions, values, thoughts and actions. 

This is why, when we are defeated, we act very much like lobsters who have lost a fight. Our posture droops. We face the ground. We feel threatened, hurt, weak. If things do not improve we become depressed. 

Much of basic neurochemistry is the same. 

Low ranking humans have low levels of serotonin. Low serotonin means decreased confidence and more response to stress. Low serotonin means less happiness, more pain, and a shorter lifespan. 

There is a primordial calculator in the foundation of your brain which monitors exactly where you are positioned in society. 

If you are low-status, you have nowhere good to live, terrible food, and are of minimal romantic interest to anyone. 

Money will make you liable to the dangerous temptations of drugs and alcohol, which are much more rewarding if you’ve been deprived of pleasure for a long period. 

The bottom of the dominance hierarchy is a terrible, dangerous place to be. 

The primeval part of the brain watches how you are treated by other people. It renders a determination of your value and assigns you a status. If you are judged by your peers as of little worth, the brain restricts serotonin, making you more physically and psychologically reactive. 

You need that reactivity. 

Emergencies are common at the bottom, you must be ready to survive. 

Unfortunately, that hyper-response burns up energy—it’s stress. 

Low status = Low serotonin = high stress

It will shut down your immune system, expending energy on services required now and sacrificing those later. 

Eat a fat and protein-heavy breakfast as soon as possible after waking up. 

No simple carbohydrates, no sugars they are digested too rapidly and produce a blood-sugar spike and rapid dip. 

Our bodies are primed to hypersecrete insulin when we engage in a complex or demanding activity after fasting all night. 

The excess insulin in the bloodstream will mop up all your blood sugar, which makes you hypoglycemic and psychologically unstable. 

This will continue all day until your system resets through sleep. 

This is why you have to sleep on a predictable schedule and eat that previously prescribed breakfast. 

Interesting: alcoholism quickly emerges when the medication causes the disease. 

The disease, a bad hangover after a night of drinking, is a painful experience the next morning. The drinker finds out that the acute pain can be ameliorated by having a few drinks in the morning. 

The temporary cure just pushes the misery into the future, but it pauses the pain nonetheless. 

Once the drinker has learned to drink to cure his hangover, he will likely become an alcoholic. 

Interesting:

Our anxiety systems are very practical. They assume that anything you run away from is dangerous. 

The proof of that, of course, is that you ran away. 

Ex. A person suffering from agoraphobia can have the condition wrought out of a simple mall experience. After an ostensible heart attack, they become anxious of the mall and are forced to the hospital. 

Next time, they remember, and are afraid. Still, they go to the mall because they have to. On the way, the heart pounds, triggering another cycle of anxiety and concern. 

To forestall panic, she avoids the stress of the mall and returns home. 

But now, the anxiety systems in her brain note that she ran away from the mall, concluding that the journey there was truly dangerous. 

As similar locations trigger attacks based on that one, parent location, the mall, they begin to occupy the same category. 

Anxiety-induced retreat makes everything retreated from, and everything similar, more anxiety-inducing. 

Depressed people frequently suffer from positive feedback loops too. 

Depressed people feel useless and burdensome, which causes them to withdraw from friends/family. 

The withdrawal makes them more lonesome and isolated, and more useless. They withdraw more... the depression spirals. 

If you’re a loser, circumstances change. Maybe you aren’t a loser, just comprised of bad habits. 

If you slump around like a defeated lobster, people will continue to assign you a lower status, and your brain will not produce as much serotonin. 

It will make you less happy, more anxious, and more likely to back down. 

It will decrease your probability of living in a good neighborhood, having access to high quality resources, and access to a desirable mate.

It’s not good. 

Same thing applied in a positive way. 

Those who start to have will probably get more. 

Ex. Emotion is partly bodily expression, and can be amplified by posture and facial expressions (smiling). 

To stand up with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open. 

Your nervous system responds in an entirely different manner when you face the demands of life voluntarily. 

You respond to the challenge, instead of bracing for the catastrophe. 

You see the gold the dragon hoards instead of shrinking in fear at the thought of a dragon nearby. 

Woman’s proclivity to say no, more than any other force, has shaped our evolution into creative, industrious, upright, large-brained creatures that we are. (41)

Nietzsche - “He who has a why can bear almost any how”

Treat yourself as someone you were responsible for helping. 

Repetition Compulsion - Freud coined the term to describe the unconscious drive to sometimes repeat the horrors of the past, sometimes to formulate those horrors more precisely or attempt more active mastery over the situation. 

This is why some people choose new acquaintances that were the same type which proved troublesome in the past. 

Not everyone who is failing is a victim, and not everyone at the bottom wishes to rise. 

The attempt to rescue someone is often fueled by vanity and narcissism. 

Dostoyevsky’s bitter classic, Notes from the Underground reveals a protagonist inflated by self importance who tries to save the prostitute Liza out of his own messianic fantasies. 

Maybe you are saving someone because you’re a strong, generous, well-put-together person who wants to do the right thing. But it’s also possible—and, perhaps, more likely—that you just want to draw attention to your inexhaustible reserves of passion and goodwill. 

Five hundred small decisions, five hundred tiny actions, compose your day, today, and every day. 

Could you aim one or two at a better result?

Could you compare your specific personal tomorrow with your specific personal yesterday?

Could you use your own judgement, and ask yourself what that better tomorrow might be?

Set the goal, by the end of the day, I want the things in my life to be a tiny bit better than they were this morning. 

Then ask, “What could I do that would accomplish that, and what small thing would I like as a reward?”

Axiomatic elements of Being: hunger, loneliness, thirst, sexual desire, aggression, fear, pain. 

We must sort and organize these desires because our desires can produce conflict with our other desires, as well as with other people, and with the world. 

Thus, we must become conscious of our desires, articulate them, prioritize them, and arrange them into hierarchies. 

Interesting: the people who wrote and edited the bible weren’t scientists. 

The viewpoints, methods, and practices of science hadn’t been formulated before the Bible was written. 

The Bible is the foundational document of Western Civilization (values, morality, conceptions of good and evil)

It’s a truly emergent document—a selected, sequenced, and finally coherent story written by no one and everyone over thousands of years. 

The Bible has been thrown up, out of the deep, by the collective human imagination. 

Its careful, respectful study can reveal things to us about what we believe and how we do and should act that can be discovered in almost no other manner. 

Expansion of be better everyday:

Ask, and ye shall receive. Knock, and the door will open. 

If you ask, as if you want, and knock, as if you want to enter, you may be offered a chance to improve your life, a little; a lot; completely—and with that some progress will be made in Being itself. 

You can teach anyone anything:

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 and deliver a reward. 

Ex. Your daughter has become reticent since she became a teenager. 

You wish she’d talk to you more. (Target = more communicative daughter)

One morning, at breakfast, she shared an anecdote about school. 

That’s the time for reward. Stop texting, listen, give attention, compliment. 

Parental interventions are critical to shaping positive behavior. 

Reward approach is difficult: you have to attend patiently until the target spontaneously manifests the desired behavior, and then reinforce. 

Maximize children’s learning so that any useful knowledge may be gained with minimal cost (pain). 

You can discipline your children, or you can shelter them, which turns the responsibility later to the harsh social world to mete out conflict/punishment. 

If a child has not been taught to behave properly by the age of 4, it will forever be difficult for them to make friends. 

Return to 136-142 for discipline/parenting

Interesting: children will definitely misbehave more in public, because they are experimenting: trying to establish if the old rules apply in the new place. 

People who experience evil may certainly desire to perpetuate it, to pay if forward. 

But it is also possible to learn good from experiencing evil. 

The capacity of the rational mind to deceive, manipulate, trick, falsify, minimize, betray, mislead, omit, bias, and rationalize is because rationality is subject to the single worst temptation—to raise what it knows now to the status of an absolute. 

The better ambitions have to do with the development of character and ability, rather than status and power. 

Status you can lose. 

You carry character with you wherever you go, and it allows you to prevail against adversity. 

Your highest value is your God. 

All people serve their ambition. 

In that matter, there are no atheists. There are only people who know, and don’t know, what God they serve. 

Do not lie, especially to yourself. Lying leads to Hell. 

Assume that the person you are listening to might know something that you don’t. 

In a debate or disagreement or simple conversation try to summarize their argument (or what they just said) to them, and ask them if you have understood properly. 

Chaos emerges in a household, bit by bit. 

Mutual unhappiness and resentment pile up. Everything untidy is swept under the rug, where the dragon feasts on the crumbs. 

But no one says anything, as the shared society and negotiated order of the household is threatened by the unexpected. 

Communication would require the admission of terrible emotions: resentment, loneliness, jealousy, frustration, hatred, boredom. 

Moment by moment, it’s easier to keep the peace. 

But in the background, like in Billy Bixbee’s house, the dragon grows. One day it bursts forth.

It lifts the house from its foundations; its an affair, a concentrated version of the acrimony that could have been tolerably spread out. 

270-271 for full story/analysis. 

Every one of the three hundred thousand unrevealed issues, which have been lied about, avoided, rationalized away, hidden like an army of skeletons in some great horrifying closet, bursts forth like Noah’s flood, drowning everything. 

There’s no ark because no one built one, and everyone hid their knowledge that the storm was gathering. 

Most valid personality predictors of success in the modern world: intelligence (cognitive ability) and conscientiousness (industriousness and orderliness). 

A good battery of personality/cognitive tests can increase the probability of employing someone more competent than average from 50:50 to 85:15. 

If you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of. 

If in crisis:

Set aside some time to talk and think about the illness or other crisis and how it should be managed every day. 

Do not talk or think about it otherwise. 

When worries associated with the crisis arise at other times, remind yourself that you will think them through during the scheduled period. 

Don’t schedule your thinking or planning at the evening or night. 

If you can’t sleep everything will go rapidly downhill. 

What shall I do with my parents?

Act such that my actions justify the suffering they endured. 

All others who have lived before you sacrificed immensely to bring about what we have now. We should act with respect for the fact. 

What shall I do with the stranger?

Invite him into my house, and treat him like a brother, so that he may become one. 

Extend the hand of trust to someone so that his or her best part can step forward and reciprocate.