Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

by Jordan B. Peterson

None of that was surprising. I had the responsibilities of an adult. I had a demanding job. I had to take care of my family, and that meant sacrificing the present and attending to the future.

Make yourself colorful, stand out, and the lions will take you down. And the lions are always there.

Art is exploration. Artists train people to see. Most people with any exposure to art now regard the work of the impressionists, for example, as both self-evidently beautiful and relatively traditional.

Artists teach people to see. It is very hard to perceive the world, and we are so fortunate to have geniuses to teach us how to do it,

They simply cannot understand why someone might torment them physically or abuse them sexually. If they are young enough, it is likely that they do not even explicitly comprehend what is happening. Comprehending such matters is exceptionally challenging, even for adults.

And if we have made a mistake in the past, and left what could be unmanifest—regardless of the reason—then we pay the price for that in the inability to forget,

Instead, when we decide, we actively confront the future. We seem destined to face something akin to unformed potential and to determine what will emerge as the present—and then the past.

It is our destiny to transform chaos into order. If the past has not been ordered, the chaos it still constitutes haunts us.

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).

Trust between people who are not naive is a form of courage, because betrayal is always a possibility, and because this is consciously understood.

Evergreens, the standard choice for Christmas trees, represent life unending, as they do not “die” annually in the same manner as their deciduous counterparts.

because you are different people. No one just simply gets along, precisely because of that.

There is also the fact that even people of good will and character locked together in matrimony will face the mundane, quotidian, dull, tragic, and terrible together, because life can be—and certainly will be at some point—difficult to the point of impossibility.

If you do not negotiate peace with your partner, that is the situation you will find yourself in. There are three fundamental states of social being: tyranny (you do what I want), slavery (I do what you want), or negotiation.

Tears, however, are just as often anger (perhaps more often) as they are sadness or distress.

if you are married to someone, you often see them at their worst, because you have to share the genuine difficulties of life with them. You save the easy parts for your adulterous partner: no responsibility, just expensive restaurants, exciting nights of rule breaking, careful preparation for romance,

An affair is not helpful, and people end up horribly hurt. Particularly children—and it is to them you owe primary allegiance.

It is of course possible that people who are more likely to get divorced, for reasons of temperament, are also more likely to live together, before or without marriage, rather or in addition to the possibility that living together just does not work.

Cohabitation without the promise of permanent commitment, socially announced, ceremonially established, seriously considered, does not produce more robust marriages.

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?

All sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds have much in common. They are unformed. They are malleable. That is not an insult. It is just a fact. It is also why they can go off to college and make a lifelong friend (no cynicism whatsoever intended)

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.

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,

If you are old enough, you know that people are badly broken.

signing up with someone who is as at least as much trouble as you. It is by no means as bad as being alone with yourself, but it is still out of the frying pan and into the fire—and at least the fire might transform you.