My Twelve Ideas for Living

Jumping on the hot new blogging trend of 2018

Here is a photograph from the other day, because photographs, internet, etc. etc.

Since all the smart people I like are doing this 12 Rules thing, I thought I’d weigh in with my own speculative, mostly experiential thoughts / definitive life advice that everyone should absolutely follow all the time. Most of the 12 Rules posts I’ve seen so far have come from folks a bit quite older than myself, and while I’m not experienced or successful enough to presume that my own 12 ideas are good or generalisable, they have served me well at various points in my life.

1. Show as much affection for the people you like as is appropriate for the level of the relationship and the other person’s comfort level, e.g. if you like hugs and your friends are cool with it, hug your friends when you see them!
2. Without being fence-sitting namby-pambies, basically everyone (myself included) would stand to benefit from being at the margin less antagonistic towards people whose values or ideas we do not share. We can almost certainly learn more from the Other than we expect. Learn not just the arguments, but the vocabulary of your opponents. If you’re interested in the same things (the topics of controversy), you’re probably saying in different words things that are, if not similar, less incompatible than you think.
3. Much of the value of using a rules-based approach to some activity (fitness, fiscal policy, life, anything) is in a combination of:
   • discovering the limits of a rules-based approach to that activity;
   • the spontaneous, serendipitous things that happen despite one’s silly rules.
4. As a young person, surround yourself with people you truly admire and wish to emulate. Find mentors, preferably ones who are in the same district/country as you but failing that — e.g. if you live in a small town/country or the skills/qualities you wish to hone are unusual in some regard — the internet works pretty well for some types of mentorship. I don’t know if “you are the average of the five people you most associate with” is true, and I don’t really even know how its truth-value would properly be evaluated, but it certainly feels true to me.
5. Marry someone who makes you laugh really hard very often. Whenever I see “marry well” as life advice, this is what I think of.
6. Mindfulness meditation is really, really, life-changingly good. The number of skeptical/rationalist types who espouse its benefits is not some weird coincidence.
7. Evaluate any statement beginning with “As a ___” (insert tribal category) in the following way:
   • Does the answer make much more sense with that clause than without it?
   • If not, then discount your estimate of the statement-maker’s IQ by 20 points.
8. Having more money is clearly better than having less, but one’s past, present or imputed future financial status should not be seen as an indicator of their personal quality. We shouldn’t look down or make fun of poor people for being poor (this is obvious to most people, but some people still do it), but nor should we either praise or despise rich people for being rich (“rich people are evil” Twitter is one of the worst Twitters).
9. If you’re on social media, you will inevitably create what is now called a ‘filter bubble’, because social media platforms are built to nudge you towards creating a bubble (rational ignorance + you can’t follow or ‘friend’ everyone). But social media bubbles are not inevitably bad. You can make your online experience at least 30% better by taking conscious steps to make your corner of the internet a better, happier place. The life lesson to take from such an exercise is decoupling what you like from what you agree with.
10. Happiness is our best weapon against a lot of the worst things in life — ill health, not having money, wasting time. Optimism too, except it works at both the personal and society levels. A sense that things are going to get better is a very good “foundation myth” to work with.
11. The depression on-off switch is not under our control, which is incredibly frustrating. But it also means we have to really enjoy, work hard, be our best selves in the times when we’re not feeling depressed. Which is really hard unless we make plans because life is distracting.
12. Lists are ever-so-slightly overrated in public (year-end lists, listicles, things like this) and still deeply underrated in private (productivity, life management, organising conversation topics).

Addendum

• Automate as much of your life as you can comfortably afford (including maintenance costs). The time you spend opening, putting, cleaning, moving and manipulating mundane stuff can never be regained, and time is the scarcest resource in the universe.
• Respect the heterogeneity of preferences. Accept El Rob’s 49th law: people like what they like, because they like them.
• Moderation is good for you, in moderation. Be the cow. Sometimes.