Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

by Jordan B. Peterson

The breakup rate among people who are not married but are living together—so, married in everything but the formal sense—is substantially higher than the divorce rate among married couples.

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

The Domestic Economy

Traditional roles are far more helpful than modern people, who vastly overestimate their tolerance for freedom and choice, tend to realize.

If there is no template for what either of you should be doing when you live together with someone, then you are required to argue about it—or negotiate about it, if you are good at that, which you are probably not. Few people are.

It is of vital necessity, in consequence, to place the domestic part of the household economy on firm ground.

That makes peace the goal, and it cannot be established except through negotiation, and that requires a commitment strong enough to withstand serious and deep conflict.

you have a story, your partner has a story, and you have a joint story. To know your story, you must tell it, and, for your partner to know it, he or she must hear it. It is necessary for that communication to happen on an ongoing basis.

If you dip below ninety minutes a week, you generate a backlog, and your mutual story begins to unwind.

daily routines are vital.

What matters, however, is not whether you fight (because you have to fight), but whether you make peace as a consequence. To make peace is to manage a negotiated solution.

When you are young and not very experienced, you are likely to make two assumptions, in a rather unquestioning and implicit manner, that are simply not true. The first is that there is someone out there who is perfect.

The second assumption is that there is someone out there who is perfect for you.

Thus, you get married, if you have any courage—if you have any long-term vision and ability to vow and adopt responsibility; if you have any maturity—and you start to transform the two of you into one reasonable person.

Finally: Romance

Romance is play, and play does not take place easily when problems of any sort arise. Play requires peace, and peace requires negotiation. And you are lucky even then if you get to play.

Here is a rule: do not ever punish your partner for doing something you want them to continue doing. Particularly if it took some real courage—some real going above and beyond the call of duty—to manage.

Do not be naive, and do not expect the beauty of love to maintain itself without all-out effort on your part.

Rule XI DO NOT ALLOW YOURSELF TO BECOME RESENTFUL, DECEITFUL, OR ARROGANT The Story Is the Thing

I want you to know how you might resist that decline, that degeneration into evil. To do so—to understand your own personality and its temptation by darkness—you need to know what you are up against. You need to understand your motivations for evil—and the triad of resentment, deceit, and arrogance is as good a decomposition of what constitutes evil as I have been able to formulate.

What is the world made of? To answer this, we will need to consider reality—the world—as it is fully experienced by someone alive and awake, with all the richness of subjective being left intact—dreams,

There is no reason to continue to effortfully and consciously apprehend what you already understand. Instead, you are liable to perceive your surroundings psychologically. You begin to consider how you are going to conduct yourself on the stage you will inevitably occupy, and what is going to happen in consequence.

Out there in the potential is everything you could have. It is the realm of unrealized possibility, and no one knows its full extent.

Left to our own devices, we turn our minds instead to investigating the future: What could be? Attempting to answer that question—that is life.

And if it is possibility that is most real, rather than actuality (as evidenced by the fact that it is possibility we are destined to contend with), then it is the investigation into possibility that is the most important of all investigations.

The answer to that, as far as I can tell, is by communicating through stories about what is and, equally, what could be.

We naturally think of our lives as stories, and communicate about our experience in that same manner.

Could that mean that the world of experience is, in truth, indistinguishable from a story—that it cannot be represented in a manner more accurate than that of the story?

You might argue, contrarily, that the scientific view of the world is more accurate,

it is still nested inside a story: one that goes something like “careful and unbiased pursuit of the truth will make the world a better place for all people,

the love of science is not precisely disinterested learning. The great experimenters and scientific writers I have known are passionate about their pursuit. Something emotional drives them.

That provides the entire pursuit with a narrative element, the motive that accompanies any good plot, and the transformation of character that makes up the best of stories.

We see animated intent everywhere1—and we certainly present the world that way to our children.

That is why it is okay with you that your car has a face

If you want to teach a child something and get them to attend, tell them a story.

We are all human. That means there is something about our experience that is the same.

In fact, the only reason you can talk about anything at all is because there are some things you do not ever have to talk about. You can just take them for granted.

We will begin by meeting the characters whose existence universally structures our understanding of the potential of the world.

The Eternal Characters of the Human Drama The Dragon of Chaos

Pinocchio and tales like it are dense, layered, and complex in ways that seize the imagination of children and will not let go.

I do not have a problem with an Evil Queen turning into a dragon. It is so self-evident that it can happen even in the middle of a popular movie

That does not explain the mystery, however. Not just any old transformation can happen within a story.

That is why it might be of more use to let your child know directly and through your own actions that there is always something sinister and dangerous in the dark, and that it is the job of the well-prepared individual to confront it and take the treasure it archetypally guards.

But there are spiritual and psychological forces operating in a predatory manner that can destroy you, as well—and they can present an even greater danger. The malevolence in the heart of people that makes them criminal falls into that category, as does the evil that drives the totalitarian war of revenge, rapine, greed, or sheer love of blood and destruction.

And that malevolence also exists in your heart, and that is the greatest dragon of all—just as mastering that malevolence constitutes the greatest and unlikeliest of individual achievements.

The fundamental representation of reality, as an eternal treasure house guarded by an eternal predator, is therefore a perfect representation of the way you are wired to react to the world at the most fundamental depths of your Being.

Nature: Creation and Destruction

There is all the bountiful, wondrous element of natural Being. But there is also the absolute horror that goes along with that: destruction, disease, suffering, and death. Those two elements of experience exist side by side.

If you understand the polarity of nature, its terror and benevolence, you recognize two fundamental elements of experience, permanent, eternal, and unavoidable, and you can begin to understand, for example, the profound pull toward sacrifice.

because we all know you must forgo gratification in the present to keep the wolf from the door in the future.