Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life

Jordan Peterson, one of the very famous youtube personality and thinkers of our time summarised his ideas or rather rules he thinks are guidelines to lead a meaningful life. This is one of the most influential books if you take these Rules by heart and try to live by them as much as you can. In this modern era of social media, AI and an array of avenues available to human kind for instant gratification, these rules try and help mitigate the challenges the life throws at us and provides a map to navigate through life.

Ankit Garg

11/25/202436 min read

Rule 1 : Stand Up Straight with your Shoulders Back

Jordan uses an example of Lobsters who are relatively ancient and easier creatures to study as compared to human beings and various studies have shown that through evolution only those lobsters have chances of survival who stand up for themselves and those who are not weak and naive. This point is even more pertinent today where we live in an age where people are living in excessive comfort zones. Students in schools and universities are brought upon the ideals of non-confrontational values which when they actually enter the real world is a contradiction to their naively built beliefs. People consider their lack of courage for moral superiority which is nothing but a narrow morality. If you are not strong, you can't stand up against tyrants and you are very likely to encounter many tyrants in your life. Naive, harmless people usually guide their perceptions and actions with a few simple axioms : people are basically good; no one really

Rule 2 : Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping.

What I inferred from this rule is that take care of yourself as you would take care of your own child. Treat yourself like you would treat your beloved pet. Suppose if your child is ill, what would be your primary responsibility, it will be to get that child to see a doctor and administer them their proper medications on time. But studies have found that half of the adult population who are prescribed these medications fail to take them. How can you be so unfair towards yourself? Another example is would you want your child to be an addict, an alcoholic, an imbecile, unskilled and unemployed, socially awkward, unhealthy and victimised good for nothing kid. I can't imagine anyone would want such things for their child but when it comes to themselves, they still engage in such activities and behaviours. The problem which people of our times face is that we shoulder intolerable burdens of self-disgust, self-contempt, shame and self-consciousness. You are not simply your own possession to torture and mistreat. This is partly because your Being is inexorably tied up with that of others, and your mistreatment of yourself can have catastrophic consequences for others. Further, to treat yourself with care does not mean to do anything that makes you happy. Your child would become happy everytime you feed him a candy. This does not mean that you feed that child a candy all day. Happy is not a synonym for "GOOD". You must help a child become a virtuous, responsible, awake being and thrive in life. Why would you accept anything less for yourself? You must discipline yourself carefully. You must keep the promises you make to yourself. DEFINE WHO YOU ARE! REFINE YOUR RESPONSIBILITY!

Rule 3 : Make friends with people who want the best for you.

Who is a friend? A friend is someone who listens to your problems when the chips are down and doesn’t just keep prodding upon how stupid you are and when you are doing good, gives a pat on your back and helps you celebrate your achievements. A friend is someone who is honest with you and speaks the unfiltered truth. We are living in times when alcoholism is as rampant as it has ever been in our society and Pot is considered a cool thing to do. Everyone wants to have a good time. And there’s nothing wrong with having a good time. But your good time shouldn’t come at the cost of direction your life is going to take. We all have seen a grown up kid. A grown up kid is one who at a point of time, probably in his young teen showed some promise but eventually faded away. This kid discovered the cool Pot or alcohol pretty early and never came back. He showed a few glimpses here and there but mostly it was a lost case. This kid is now getting older. He suddenly discovers he is not a kid anymore but a grown up adult. He failed to acquire any skill which he thinks his intelligence demands. He is unable to take care of himself let alone anyone else. He is resentful. He is miserable. He thinks the world is an unfair place. You don’t want to be this person. And you don’t want to be friends with this person either. And don't

Rule 4: Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.

We live in an ever connected world of social media. It seems like we have access to so many lives around us, constanly looking at what is going on in other people's lives. And with such access, where everyone is busy showing their best side on the internet, our life can feel meek, lacking in many respects with regards to those we constanly see having the time of their lives. Another drawback this instant access has that it forces us to think in terms of all too black and white words : "success" or "failure". We are either a success, a comprehensive, singular, over-all good thing, or its opposite, a failure, singular, irredeemably bad thing. However, in a world as complex as ours, such generalizations are a sign of naive, unsophisticated or even malevolent analysis. We are unique individuals with unique DNA having unique upbringings, having a uniquely formed brain and unique circumstances and situations we have gone through. Our capabilities are different, thinking processes are different, the conditions of our lives become increasingly individual and unique as we mature and hence less and less comparable to others. We all have an internal critic who is always pointing at our shortcomings with regards to others, but we need to direct this internal critic 

think that it is virtuous and your moral responsibility to save this kid. This kid is not a victim. He doesn’t want to be saved. Not everyone at the bottom wishes to rise. And your naive wish to save this kid might very well be fuelled by your vanity and narcissism. You might be attempting to atone your thousand sins by repenting only for the hundred. You might be the underground man from the Fyodor Dostoevsky’s all time classic “Notes From the Underground”. Before you help someone, you should find out why that person is in trouble. You shouldn’t assume everyone to be a noble victim of unjust circumstances. If that person doesn’t assume any personal responsibility for his/her circumstances, you deny that person all the agency in the past and strip him/her of their power. How do I know that your suffering is not the demand of martyrdom for my resources, so that you could just momentarily delay the inevitable. Your nihilism doesn’t have to be my doom.

I am not being cynical here and telling you to not have friends. I am also not propagating to do away with your kindness and compassion. These are the virtues which have helped people in the most dire circumstances. Jesus was kind and compassionate even while being crucified. Rather I am telling you to not make your strongest virtues into your weakness. Carl Rogers, the famous humanistic psychologist, believed it was impossible to start a therapeutic relationship if the person seeking help did not want to improve. I am telling you to help those who want to be helped genuinely, who want to bear the responsibility for their circumstances and who don’t just blame the whole world for their situation, rather who want to be better despite being dealt a bad hand. Don’t waste your virtues for someone’s nihilistic view of the world. Choose your friends carefully. The direction your life takes depends upon the acquaintances you make. DON’T BECOME A MARTYR FOR A DOOMED CAUSE.

to make ourselves a base point. I am not saying that we give up the idea of comparison or stop listening to our internal critic or not address the resentment that has built up inside us. That is even worse than comparing ourself to others. That is giving up on life. But I want you to aim for 1% better everyday, or every week, or fortnightly, even monthly works. But you should always aim higher. And you will be surprised to see how good decisions compound and stack themselves up in your life. You will see your baseline to comparison get higher with every 1% and doing this for 3 years will change your life forever. You might be envious of your boss's job, you might be jealous of your friend's beauty, you might be bitter about the your cousin's easy life. But you need to dig deeper. You need to ask youself some very profound questions. And you will find all these emotions pointing towards a deep sense of insecurity. You need to let your soul be laid bare. You will need to disintegrate yourself before building yourself back together bit by bit carefully. And while doing so, you will see your path be revealed to you. Take that path. While on this path you will learn to let go of others. You will find peace and content. Your divinity will shine on you.  REMEMBER 1% BETTER EVERY DAY!

Rule 5: Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.

Everyone likes children. Every parent loves everything about their children. If that is how you think, you are not only naive, you are also treading a path which is a recipe for disaster not only for you but also for your child. And this is not me. Father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, by his own account: "An overprotected child may develop an oral fixation, which could lead to them resisting maturation and remaining dependent on others".  When children are over-sheltered and overprotected, they turn into grown children, and not proper adults. This is the curse of the over-protective mother. Today's parents are afraid to scold their child. They are deemed proximal agents of social tyranny if they attempt to discipline their child and bring to them order and structure. This is because we as a society now are unable to distinguish between chaos of immaturity and responsible freedom. This lack of discipline leads to producing more and more narcissists. These children who are not disciplined properly become socially undesirable, they are unable to distinguish between what behaviour is acceptable in the society and what is not. Other kid's parents detest them. As they grow and face the world, they are faced with the harsh reality where real world is in sharp contrast to their parent's always confortable and overprotected surroundings. Where everything is not as hunky 

dory as they always envisioned. They start seeing the world as being unfair to them, a cruel place. They absolve themselves of all responsibility and these narcisstic kids can end up becoming shooters shooting kids through high-schools deeming the world an unfair place, they can end up becoming Hitler, exacting revenge upon everyone. You can see where this is going. By overprotecting your child you make them weak, naive and immature. Instead discipline your child. Prepare your child to face the harsh realities of the world. Make them responsible. Teach them the consequences of their actions. Encourage them when they do something right and punish them to instill in them the idea of acceptable and unacceptable. Pat them on the back to encourage their responsible behaviour. Give them freedom to be able to learn significant lessons of the world in a controlled environment. Nurture in them the beliefs that will serve them for a long time and tell them that you will catch them whenever they fall but they need to learn to walk on their own.      HELP YOUR CHILD TAKE ON THE WORLD AND MAKE IT A BETTER PLACE!

Rule 6 : Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world.

Leo Tolstoy while questioning the human existence, "According to rational knowledge, it followed that life is evil, and people know it. They do not have to live, yet they have lived and they do live, just as I myself had lived, even though I had known for a long time that life is meaningless and evil." One of the greatest and most influential Russian author of all time descending towards the depth of nihilism. Why would Tolstoy see at the world like that? One might ask. Because that is the ultimate truth. Life is indeed very hard, it is full of suffering. Ask a child who lost both parents, ask parents, who lost their child, ask the jews who suffered in concentration camps, ask the blacks who had no choice but to be a slave.  At times this suffering is self inflicted or willful blindness or poor decision making or malevolence. It might seem just or reasonable here but what if it's not you, if it's pure force of nature, it's something you could never have controlled, if it was pure dumb ill luck: You have 2 options to chose from. VENGEANCE OR TRANSFORMATION. 

VENGEANCE : When engulfed with the idea of this world being unfair, brutal and worthless, the easiest thing to do is to find solace in nhilism. When you become nhilistic, you essentially take away the meaning from life and this can so easily infest as destruction. One such example is Carl Panzram, the most vengeful murderers of the twentieth century, was raped, brutalized and betrayed while he was a juvenile. How did he response? He emerged, enraged beyond measure, as burglar, arsonit, rapist and serial killer. He aimed consciously and consistently at destruction. He started by hating the individuals who hurt him, his resentment grew and it festered as hatred towards all mankind and he raped, murdered and burned to express his outrage. Panzaram's response (even if terrible beyond comprehension) was perfectly understable. He had been wronged and he responded by looking at the world/ God himself with disdain.

TRANSFORMATION : Nietzsche wrote, "Distress, whether psychic, physical, or intellectual, need not at all produce nihilism (that is, the radical rejection of value, meaning and desirability). Such distress always permits a variety of interpretations." What Nietzsche meant was that people who experience evil in their life may certainly have the desire to perpetuate it, to make the world pay but it is also possible to learn good by experiencing evil. A bullied boy can mimic his tormentors, but he can also learn from his misery to be kind and compassionate and make this world a better place. Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, a prisoner in soviet labour camp in the middle of terrible twentieth century who faught as a soldier in Russian Front Lines during Nazi invasion was imprisoned by his own people and then was struck by cancer. The conditions were brutal and he witnessed pointless and degrading suffering and death of his friends and acquaintances. He had every reason to curse God, every reason to resent the world. What did he do instead? He looked inside, contemplated his own behaviour and then he asked imself the most difficult question: Had he personally contributed to the catastrophe of his life? He then remembered his unquestioning support for communist party in his early years, his failure to question their actions, his betraying of his own consciousness and what can be done to atone his mistakes. He took himself apart, piece by piece, let what was unnecessary and harmful die, and resurrected himself, TRANSFORMED himself. Then he wrote "The Gulag Archipelago". This book banned in USSR, demolished the intellectual credibility of communism and he shook the whole pathalogial system of communist tyranny to its core. T.S. Eliot, the renowned poet, in his play, The Cocktail Party, had a character who was having a very hard time. She consults a psychiatrist and tells him that she hopes, her profound unhappiness is due to her own faults to which the psychiatrist is taken aback and asks her why she would hope that. She replies that if it’s her own fault, she might be able to do something about it, rectify her flaws somehow as opposed to finding God’s fault in which case reality itself is flawed, hell bent on ensuring her misery and she couldn’t do anything about it then.

If you are suffering, well that’s the norm. Life is tragic. Maybe it is your fault, maybe it is not, maybe life has been unceremoniously unfair to you. But you can’t blame the world, until you clean your act. Look inside, have some humility, find things that you can improve in your life that need your attention, which will improve your situation. Start small, start with something you can work upon, maybe clean up your room, maybe make up your bed, maybe declutter your mails, maybe work for 1 hour or half hour or 15 minutes, but be honest in your intention. Watch what happens over days and weeks, you fill find your authentic being emerging, you will find your virtues manifest, your judgement will improve, perhaps you will find your less corrupted soul, perhaps you will now be able to let your tragedy be tragedy and not become outright hell, maybe your anxiety, and hopelessness, and resentment, and anger-however murderous, initially will recede. Perhaps you will see that if all people do this, in their own lives, the world might stop being an evil place. REMEDY YOUR MISTAKES FIRST BEFORE RESENTING THE WORLD!

Rule 7 : Pursue what is meaningful (Not what is expedient)

Well the first question is what exactly is meaningful, and why to pursue it and not be hedonistic and do whatever our impulses desire?  Let’s look at the history. What did Christ do? While he was in captivity, he very well could have resorted to lie and deceit and could have escaped that fate to be free in the immediate future. What did he do instead? He sacrificed himself for the redemption of the all mankind. He knew his sacrifice of today will reap fruits in the future, not immediately visible, but in the distant future. What did Lord Rama from the epic Ramayana do when his father asked him to leave the kingdom and live in exile. He very well could have revolted, all the kingdom would have sided with him. Instead he went in exile, he sacrificed his present for the upliftment of mankind. It doesn’t matter if we think of these epic personalities to have actually existed or not. What matters is that we have been telling these sophisticated epic tales from a long time but we fail to interpret their message. This message of sacrificing today for the better future has been developed by our forefathers by noticing its implications over a long period of time. Why are we told to study or learn a new skill when we are young? So as to make sacrifice today which will result in a better future for us? We are told to learn to speak and walk and learn to socialise, so that these little sacrifices today can help us bear their fruits for a lifetime. But then you will argue quite reasonably I am no Christ, my father has not exiled me from a kingdom. Where is my meaning to be found then? Well your meaning is to be found in a goal you formulate which you set to be virtuous using your belief system, aiming at achieving your potential. And how do you achieve your potential, by sacrificing your present., by doing small tasks each day aimed at ultimately

to the top of the mountain. Let’s understand it like this, the basic human triad of needs can be said to be Food, Shelter and Intimate Relationship. Food and shelter is generally achieved through making small sacrifices today so as to enable us to generate enough useful skills that we can offer to the world, which in return gives us resources to maybe get a steady food on the table and a roof over our heads. For an Intimate relationship to last we cultivate it over a period of time by building trust and mutual cooperation and exchange of welfare slowly and steadily to establish a long term stability and remove uncertainty in future. We very well could engage in instant gratification of our impulses by engaging in adultery and cheating and lying and deceit and see where that leads us in pursuit of an intimate partner. Psychological literature on how one night stands has an adverse impact on an individual’s ability to sustain any long term meaningful relationships is pretty clear. Still we find more and more people give into their impulses and forgo the things that will exuberate a meaning to their existence. Also, don’t be naive to find meaning in shallow pursuits. I have a friend whom I asked what his dream life he imagines to be. He very quickly responded with him being able to enjoy the rest of his life having a beach house enjoying the beach and partying all day and drinking margaritas. Well, good luck with that, I told him. Try doing this daily for a period of a month and then see how you feel about it? This is the pathway to low self worth, bad health and mental deprivation. Expedience is the following of blind impulse. It’s short term gain. It’s narrow and selfish. It lies to get its way. Expedience- that’s hiding all the skeletons in the closet. That’s covering the blood you just spilled with a carpet. It’s cowardly, shallow and wrong, mere expedience, multiplied by many repetitions, produces the character of a demon. Meaning trumps expedience, meaning gratifies all impulses, now and forever. If you act properly, your actions allow you to be psychologically integrated now, and tomorrow, and into the future, while you benefit yourself, your family, and the broader world around you. Meaning is the way, the path of life more abundant, the place you live when you are guided by Love and speaking truth and when nothing you want or could possibly want takes any precedence over precisely that. DELAY YOUR GRATIFICATIONS FOR A MEANINGFUL PURPOSE!

Rule 8 : Tell the truth- or, atleast, don't lie.

Why do I need to speak the truth? One might ask and there's no harm in questioning the conventional wisdom that we have inherited from our forefathers. You need to be truthful because when you don't, you betray yourself, your soul, your being, you become inauthentic. Why does it matter? It matters because  then you break the most important virtue which binds you to yourself and to the world around you. Nothing good can come out of this spurious way of living. Inauthenticity even though might seem trivial at first, can lead to hell, it fosters the growth of devil and it has the capacity to plunge all humanity into darkness. Lie is a pathway to hell. Let me elaborate these claims. We need to travel to pre World War 2 Germany to understand this. The country was in turmoil after the losses of the First World War and the sanctions being imposed on them by other European powers. The economy plunged and people had little to no means to survive, the situation was dire and everyone was vulnerable. No one seemed ready to take on the responsibility for the losses and a former comrade of the Bavarian Army during the Great War, decides to try his hands at politics and starts his political career with a lie, with a delusional notion that Germany lost war due to misdeeds of one community, namely Jews and the army and the authority were absolved of moral responsibility for this situation, that it was all a Jewish conspiracy. Now, Hitler did come up with a lie, but what about his fellow party workers. They seconded him, knowing fully well that it can never be a truth; fellow Germans, fellow comrades of the German War Machinery in the Great War, the people in authority, all knew this wasn’t true, but they lied, they decided to be inauthentic, the small lies lead to bigger lies, bigger lies led to a delusional utopia, utopia of Great German Nation (without any Jews), pure Aryan Race, Hitler ruling over the world, lies after lies, leading to delusions after delusions, resulting in loss of close to 90 million human lives and loss of 6 million Jewish lives to the dark scar on human morality forever in the name of Holocaust. Lies lead to this loss, lies

foster inauthenticity, inauthenticity breeds corruption and corruption is a pathway to the devil’s liar. The sins of an inauthentic individual compound and corrupt the state. You work in a Government office. Your boss is a greedy bureaucrat who doesn’t fulfill his obligations unless he is bribed. You know this fully well, it also irritates you a little, but you let it pass and do not report since you don’t want any trouble. You feel it doesn’t affect you. But it might affect the person who is paying this bribe out of his treasury to get his well deserved work completed, it certainly might affect the wages of the daily earner who might be working for this guy already struggling to put food on the table for his family, it certainly might affect the future of his child whose education can’t be afforded now. Your one act of weakness in the face of truth can have innumerable consequences. Nazi Germany was full of people like these, who shirked away from moral responsibility, who decided to look the other way when Jews were being dragged to the ghettos, when millions were being transported as sheep’s to slaughter to the deadly Gas Chambers of Auschwitz. Victor Frankl, the psychiatrist and Nazi concentration camp survivor wrote the classic Man’s Search for Meaning and concluded : “deceitful, inauthentic individual existence is precursor to social totalitarianism.” C.G. jung knew that moral problems plagued his patients, and such problems were caused by untruth. First a little lie; then several little lies to prop it up. After that distorted thinking to avoid the shame that those lies produce, then a few more lies to cover the consequences of the distorted thinking; then conversion of this distorted thinking into unconscious beliefs leading to falsehood. It’s a vicious cycle and it corrupts your being, your soul, your reality and your belief systems.

To tell the truth is to bring the most habitable reality into Being. Truth builds edifices that can stand a thousand years. Truth feeds and clothes the poor, and makes nations wealthy and safe. Truth reduces the terrible complexity of a man to the simplicity of his word, so that he can become a partner, rather than an enemy. Truth is the light in the darkness. It will keep your soul from withering and dying while you encounter the inevitable tragedy of life. If your life is not what it could be, try telling the truth. In Paradise, everyone speaks truth. That is what makes it paradise. SEE THE TRUTH! TELL THE TRUTH!

Rule 9 : Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don't.

NOT ADVICE! Listening to others doesn't amount jumping to conclusions or advising them. Listening means to engage in genuine conversation which involves exploration and articulation, it means paying attention. It is amazing what people will tell you if you listen, they will tell you what is wrong with them, and if you pay attention long enough, they will eventually tell you how they plan to fix it. I had a close friend, he was an alcoholic, he  partied frequently, he loved to have a good time, he was a free spirit, he had multiple sexual encounters with multiple people in intoxicated state frequently. He used to boast about it. Then after a few years of spending his youth partying around and doing whatever he fancied, he had a downfall. He was not able to hold on to a steady job, obviously because of his tendancy to party late nights drunk and then finding himself at the place of some lady next morning hungover. He was living off his parents' money. We were out of touch for some period but out of the blue he called me and wanted to catch up. So we met and he told me that he is struggling, he doesn't have any source of Income and his liver is damaged and he feels empty inside and is unable to forge any meaningful relationship. I paid attention to him, he didn't have many people who would do that, we started meeting frequently. We used to converse, it was mostly him speaking and me listening. One day he himself told me, that his alcoholism and hedonism had led to his most problems and he would improve his life. I never adviced him on anything. I just listened to whatever he had to say and he trusted me because he knew, I was genuinely interested in whatever he had to say. If I

Rule 10 : Be precise in your speech.

We need to be careful with what we focus our attention to. When we let things slide, when things are no longer specified, the walls crumble and chaos breeds. When we’re careless, what we have refused to attend to gathers itself up, adopts a serpentine form, and strikes often at the worst possible moment. Imagine a loyal and honest wife suddenly comes to know about the infidelity of her husband. She has lived alongside him for years. She saw him as someone who is reliable, hard working, loving, dependable. But with time he became less attentive and more distracted, he started working long hours. One day she finds him interacting with a woman in some cafe in a manner difficult to rationalise and ignore. Her false perceptions of her husband become painfully obvious. Her theory of her husband collapses. He is no longer the solid rock her marriage was standing upon. But that is only half the problem. Her theory of herself collapses too, she is no longer the “well-loved, secure wife, and valued partner”. Her belief systems collapse with this betrayal. Is the once reasonably content wife now a “deceived innocent” or a “gullible fool”? And what about her husband, is he a unsatisfied lover, a target of seduction or psychopathic liar? How could he be so cruel? How could she be so naive? Everything that was held dear crumbles to dust. What we perceive, when things fall apart, is no longer the stage and settings of habitable order. She ruminates obsessively, What went wrong? What did she do that was so unforgivable? Who is this person she has been living with? What kind of world is this, where such things can happen? What kind of god would make such a place? What conversation could she possibly initiate with this new, infuriating person, inhabiting the shell of her former husband? Her last place of bedrock security was in fact not stable, not certain-not bedrock at all. Her house was built on a foundation of sand.

Rule 11 : Do not bother children when they are skateboarding.

Children love skateboarding because it is risky, if you fall you might have a bruise or two. These risks make the play challenging and worthy enough to engage in. If they weren’t risky, kids won’t be interested. So, why is there this affinity towards the risk taking, because this risk taking besides being thrilling, also teaches how much risk is enough risk, what is the threshold of risk taking kids can reach and how they can compete and improve through that. When encouraged, we love to live on the edge. Overprotected, we fail when something dangerous, unexpected and full of opportunity suddenly makes its appearance, as it inevitably will. Children these days are so overprotected, that they when are confronted with the real world, they collapse. They think world is as easy as their parents made it out to be for them. Parents are so afraid to let their children fly that they unconsciously cut their wings. The Oedipal Parents say to their child, “I only live for you.” They do everything for their children, they tie their shoes, serve them food, cut their nails, do their homework even. They make a pact with their child, “Never Leave Us. In return we will do everything for you.” These children age without maturity since they never have to take any responsibility. These children end up becoming bitter and resentful when they face the inevitability of the truthfulness of the harsh world. The Oedipal mother is the witch in the story of Hansel and Gretel. The two children in that fairy tale have a new step-mother. She orders her husband to abandon his children in the forest, as there is a famine and she thinks they

Rule 12 : Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street.

Dogs are OK too. Life is inevitably a suffering. Why do you think people look for meaning to their lives? How else can they be encouraged to take on the hardships and still not become nihilistic. Ask the parents who have lost their child at birth, ask the people who had to endure the holocaust, ask someone who has lost their limb, ask the devoured lover whose love wasn’t accepted, ask the betrayed wife whose loyalty was rewarded with deceit, ask the child whose parents divorced early, ask the kid who was bullied, ask the daughter who was abused, ask the innocent rape victim whose tormentor roams free. Add to this the natural disasters which nature has in store for us from time to time and it’s very easy to lose all sense of purpose and meaning. What kind of God would allow such absurdities to exist, and what for?, one may question. And all these questions are totally justifiable. And with all this tragedies around it’s very easy for us to lose sense of self. I have battled number of years of my life through depression. Sometimes, life gets easier, other times it can be hard to be functional. I had a habit of ruminating upon past when things did not go the way, I would have wanted them to and then at times there have been factors beyond my control but from my late teens, depression had been my constant ally. It’s amazing what being mentally unhealthy can do to you. There were days when I would not want to meet anyone, I would just lay on my bed and want it to swallow me. I always loved to play video games but amazingly even that wouldn’t get me off my bed. In the beginning it was very hard. I would not want to study.But such is life. From suffering and hardship has humanity found its purpose and flourished even yet. I had to attend classes to study for my degree

wants to hurt anyone else; the threat of force, physical or otherwise, is wrong. These axioms collapse, or worse, in the presence of individuals who are genuinely malevolent. Such individuals typically come from hyper sheltered families, where nothing terrible is allowed to exist, and everyting is fairyland wonderful. Carl Jung, the greatest psychologists of years gone by wrote, “Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.” What he clearly meant there is a dark side to all of us which he referred to as the shadow. Without embracing this dark side, we could never truly actualise our true self. Consciousness can not be attained unless this dark shadow is integrated with oneself to become one Being. And we subconsciously as humanity have been aware of this fact. Harry Potter comes to mind, he and his band of friends were not obedient school children heeding to everything they were told. They wanted to risk breaking the rules for the adventure. Harry had a dark side, he could talk to snakes, but still he stood up for what is right. Batman is something similar. He emraced his darkness and channelised it for the good of people. There is a darkness in all of us. We need to embrace it and still choose Good over Evil, Order over Chaos. You would mistake your lack of teeth for a reason of not biting back your oppressor, where the truth actually is that when you once grow your teeth you actually don't need to use them. So stand up for your rights, do away with this naive perception that everyone is a great human being, if that were so, we wouldn't still be witnessing wars, World War II wouldn't have happened, millions of jews let alone many other lives lost during that tumultous period wouldn't have occured. So do away with this idea that strength and force are not a necessary virtue. You can be kind and compassionate only when you have the strength and courage to take on your tyrant heads up and make this world a better place. BE STRONG AND FIERCE.

wouldn't be or if I assumed to know all the answers and pretended to be riding a high horse, he wouldn't have opened up to me. Then his alcohol consumption reduced. He once asked me for help to create a CV, and I happily obliged. I didn't need to conjure any advices for him, he himself came up with those, he just needed someone to listen to him, to pay attention. Well I had my own motives to listen to him, I myself got to learn how indulging in gratification of the senses instantly can disrupt life and I learned a lesson for myself too. Similar thing happened to me also. There was a time when I was really struggling in life, and started suffering from acute depression and anxiety, I wouldn't want to go out of my home, won't meet anyone, won't do anything, lost my appetite and lost 20 pounds of weight in a period of 45 days. Then, I decided to meet a therapist because why not. She would pay attention to me, without judging me, not jumping to conclusions and I started opening up to her. I told her about my problems and she would listen attentively, nodding her head. Slowly, after a few sessions, I was surprised that, it was me who came up with the solutions and not her. I asked her this is surprising to me to which she responded by this is what psychotherapy is meant to be. People by opening up unravel their own thoughts, make a structure of them and deal with them in a constructive way. They just need someone to listen to them and pay attention. People who need to talk are generally people who need to think. When someone is listening to them, then they are forced to articulate their problems and hence they make a structure around them as opposed to  wandering blindly into the pits of random thoughts in their minds. It also makes them see that their problems might actually have a solution and the issues which seemed overwhelming at first could be conquered. And it goes both ways, when you attentively listen to someone in distress and want to help them, it helps you also, you learn to practice empathy, you learn to practice non-judgement and you learn to apply the lessons in your own life because hell, your life is not perfect either. Genuine thinking can really help people, genuine thinking is simple but not easy, infact it is very rare. For an individual to think properly, they need to have 2,3,4 view points in their mind and they need to create saperate avatars for each view point and then come to a rational conclusion. True thinking requires one to be an articulate speaker and careful, judicious listener, at the same time. "Fyodor Dostoevsky", the greatest russian author, in his all time classic "The Brothers Karamazov" portrays the 2 brothers Ivan and Alyosha with Ivan representing atheism and lack of faith and Alyosha the younger one representing faith, and the world of God. He puts forth the strongest defence possible by Ivan for his atheism and lack of belief citing the heart wrenching story of a young girl. Here is an excerpt from there:

“This poor child of five was subjected to every possible torture by those cultivated parents. They beat her, thrashed her, kicked her for no reason till her body was one bruise. Then, they went to greater refinements of cruelty—shut her up all night in the cold and frost in a privy, and because she didn't ask to be taken up at night (as though a child of five sleeping its angelic, sound sleep could be trained to wake and ask), they smeared her face and filled her mouth with excrement, and it was her mother, her mother did this. And that mother could sleep, hearing the poor child's groans! Can you understand why a little creature, who can't even understand what's done to her, should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and the cold, and weep her meek unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her? Do you understand that, friend and brother, you pious and humble novice? Do you understand why this infamy must be and is permitted? Without it, I am told, man could not have existed on earth, for he could not have known good and evil. Why should he know that diabolical good and evil when it costs so much? Why, the whole world of knowledge is not worth that child's prayer to ‘dear, kind God’! I say nothing of the sufferings of grown-up people, they have eaten the apple, damn them, and the devil take them all! But these little ones! I am making you suffer, Alyosha, you are not yourself. I'll leave off if you like.” Dostoevsky was the profoundest of thinkers. Through Ivan he would make the most strongest possible defence for atheism and there being no God as which God would allow a suffering an innocent 5 year child at the hands of her own parents and would deny to heed her prayers and through that he asked himself and whole mankind the most difficult questions and still came up with equally compelling answers through Alyosha who would still manage to look beyond Ivan’s lack of faith with his belief in God. That is genuine thinking, a conversation such as this is one where it is the desire for truth itself. Here, you are allowing new information to inform you- to repair your soul and expand its domain. So, listen, to yourself and to those with whom you are speaking. Your wisdom then consists not of the knowledge you already have, but the continual search for knowledge, which is the highest form of wisdom. LISTEN, THINK AND THEN SPEAK!

There is a story for children, There’s No Such Things as a Dragon, by Jack Kent. It’s about a small boy, Billy Bixbee, who spies a dragon sitting on his bed one morning. It's about the size of a house cat, and friendly. He tells his mother about it, but she tells him that there's no such thing as a dragon. So, it starts to grow. It eats all of Billy's pancakes. Soon it fills the whole house. Mom tries to vaccum, but she has to go in and out of the house through the windows because of the dragon everywhere. It takes her forever. Then, the dragon runs off with the house. Billy's dad comes home—and there's just an empty space, where he used to live. The mailman tells him where the house went. He chases after it, climbs up the dragon's head and neck (now sprawling out into the street) and rejoins his wife and son. Mom still insists that the dragon does not exist, but Billy, who's pretty much had it by now, insists, “There is a dragon, Mom.” Instantly, it starts to shrink. Soon, it's cat-sized again. Everyone agrees that dragons of that size (1) exist and (2) are much preferable to their gigantic counterparts. Mom, eyes reluctantly opened by this point, asks why it had to get so big. Billy quietly suggests: “MAYBE IT WANTED TO BE NOTICED.” That’s the moral of the story. Chaos emerges in households bit by bit. Everything is swept under the rug, where the dragon feasts on the crumbs, but no one is willing to notice. Noticing it would require communication involving admission of terrible emotions : resentment, terror, loneliness, despair, jealousy, frustration, hatred, boredom. One day it bursts forth in a form no one can ignore. It lifts the house from its foundation, maybe in the form of an affair. Maybe the demolished couple could have had a conversation or two, or two hundred. Maybe they could have fought through their roles. Maybe they could have more precisely specified their desired manner of living. Maybe they could have done that instead of saying, in the agreeable, lazy and cowardly way : “It’s OK. It’s not worth fighting about.” Every single voluntarily unprocessed and uncomprehended and ignored reason for marital failure will compound and conspire and then plague both the betrayer and the betrayed. Maybe they could have let the dragon out of the closet when it was still small, still tameable. Why avoid, when avoidance inevitably poisons the future? Why remain vague when it renders life stagnant and murky? Why refuse to investigate, when knowledge of reality enables to see beyond the darkness of ignorance. Maybe you’ll get hurt. Probably you’ll get hurt. Life is after all, suffering. But maybe the wounds won’t be fatal. To re-emerge, to be reborn, you must thoughtfully articulate the reality which you comfortably, but dangerously left hidden behind a veil of ignorance and the pretence of peace. When things fall apart, we can give structure to it and re-establish order, through our speech. This is difficult, but the difficulty is not relevant, because the alternative is worse. Precision may leave tragedy intact, but it chases away the ghouls and demons. What you hear in the forest but can not see might be a tiger. But if you turn and look, perhaps it’s just a squirrel. If you refuse to look, however, then it’s a dragon, and you’re no knight. If you shirk the responsibility of confronting the unexpected, even when it appears in manageable doses, reality itself will become unsustainably disorganised and chaotic. Search for the correct words. Organise those words into correct sentences, and those sentences into correct paragraphs. DON’T HIDE BABY MONSTERS UNDER THE CARPET. THEY WILL FLOURISH!

eat too much. He obeys his wife, takes his children deep into the woods and leaves them to their fate. Wandering, starving and lonely, they come across a miracle. A house. And not just any house. A candy house. A gingerbread house. A person who had not been rendered too caring, empathic, sympathetic and cooperative might be skeptical, and ask, "Is this too good to be true?" But the children are too young, and too desperate. Inside the house is a kind old woman, rescuer of distraught children, kind patter of heads and wiper of noses, all bosom and hips, ready to sacrifice herself to their every wish, at a moment's notice. She feeds the children anything they want, any time they want, and they never have to do anything. But provision of that kind of care makes her hungry. She puts Hansel into a cage, to fatten him up ever more efficiently. He fools her into thinking he's staying thin by offering her an old bone, when she tries to test his leg for the desired tenderness. She gets too desperate to wait, eventually, and stokes the oven, preparing to cook and eat the object of her doting. Gretel, who has apparently not been lulled into full submission, waits for a moment of carelessness, and pushes the kind old woman into the oven. The kids run away, and rejoin their father, who has thoroughly repented of his evil actions. The friend I was talking about earlier. He was too agreeable. His parents wouldn’t let him out of their crutches and let him grow. He was still dependent on his parents for his survival. He would spend most of his time smoking pot or high on some other drug. He hated all men because all other men were competitive and doing well for themselves. He eventually started hating women also because they would not pay him much attention. He wasn’t always like this. He started out bright but he wasn’t allowed to take risks, to fly. He wasn’t allowed to learn his lessons by making his own mistakes. He was always protected and didn’t have to take any responsibility. Ultimately he failed to learn to do so. He was suffering from a dependent personality disorder. He blamed the whole world and the world couldn’t care less. That is the harsh reality of the world we live in. And it’s the responsibility of the parents to not devour their children by rendering them weak and helpless. They produce overly agreeable, compassionate, empathic and conflict-averse people who let people walk over them, and then become bitter. They sacrifice themselves for others, sometimes excessively, and can not comprehend why that is not reciprocated, this robs them of their independence. No one wants you when you are weak. Your fellow peers will not respect you, if you can’t stand up for yourself, why should they? This world is a bully and you need to learn to stand up to your oppressor. You can’t always be a victim, you can’t always shirk responsibility, you need to grow teeth and you need to learn to use them. you can’t spend your life dwelling in the basement of your parents’ house playing video games and watching porn. You resent women for not paying you any attention, why should they? What good are you? There are plenty of others out their working hard, taking responsibilities and showing signs of a desirable man to be with. Why would they look at you? Women don’t need a child to deal with. They need a partner who can help her raise children and take her responsibility. Why would she even look at you, when you can’t even take your own responsibility? Get your act together. You need to man up, take your well deserved place in this world and fulfil your meaning to this life. You need to come out of your parent’s shadow and realise your individuality. You will find that as you take on the world, your resentment starts to dissolve, you start finding your purpose and through that you start finding yourself, you are no longer at the mercy of others, rather you have the reins in your own hand for once. You will eventually maybe find some women are willing to give you a try, but you need to give yourself a try first. GET ON THAT SKATEBOARD! TAKE SOME RISKS!

but I would prefer the classes where I am alone and not in the company of anyone else. I would not talk to my parents and would not eat proper food for days. I had a hard time sleeping and would find any motivation hard to come by. Life seemed like an endless tale of tragedies. During such phases of life, everything can seem meaningless, your belief in everything can collapse and you wander constantly towards nihilism. That is precisely the time when you need to find meaning and joy in the simplest and smallest of things. I loved playing Guitar from my childhood and always dreamed of maybe performing as a part of a band, like Kurt Cobain someday! So, I started to play Guitar regularly and the sound of those strings would calm my nerves. I would listen to my favourite songs and that would comfort me. I learnt that when life is not going my way, when things are tough, I need to start finding joy in the smallest of things. I would watch a sci-fi movie and it would give me a monumental joy due to my love for sciences. I would draw and paint and it would relax my overthinking, anxious mind. So, when times are hard, look for the beauty in the simplest things that nature has to offer us. Maybe a walk in the nature will calm your mind, maybe a trek to the mountains, maybe a cup of coffee, maybe a conversation with your friend, maybe the antics of the cute cat you have with you or smile on your dog’s face whenever he sees you return home. Human life fundamentally has many limitations, if it weren’t so, we would be Gods. If we were perpetually happy, joy would lose its meaning. Only when life is hard, we miss the normalities of our lives. Imagine a Being who is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. What does such a being lack? The answer? Limitation. If you are already everything, everywhere, always, there is nowhere to go and nothing to be. Everything that could be already is, and everything that could happen already has. And it is for this reason, so the story goes, that God created man. Man=Limitation. And no limitation means no story. So your story comes inherently out of your limitations. A realization of this sort emerged more recently, in the pop culture world, during the evolution of the DC Commies cultural icon Super-man. Superman was created in 1938 by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuter, In the beginning, he could move cars, trains and even ships. He could run faster than a locomotive. He could "leap over tall buildings in a single bound." As he developed over the next four decades, however, Superman's power began to expand. By the late sixties, he could fly faster than light. He had super-hearing and X-ray vision. He could blast heat-rays from his eyes. He could freeze objects and generate hurricanes with his breath. He could move entire planets. Nuclear blasts didn't faze him. And, if he did get hurt, somehow, he would immediately heal. Superman became invulnerable. Then a strange thing happened. He got boring. The more amazing his abilities became, the harder it was to think up interesting things for him to do. DC first overcame this problem in the 1940s. Superman became vulnerable to the radiation produced by kryptonite, a material remnant of his shattered home planet. Eventually, more than two dozen variants emerged. Green kryptonite weakened Superman. In sufficient dosage, it could even kill him. So why did this all too powerful God like superhero had to let go of his godly powers? Well, he developed powers so extreme that he could "deus" himself out of anything, at any time. In consequence, in the 198os, the franchise nearly died. Artist-writer John Byrne successfully rebooted it, rewriting Superman, retaining his biography, but depriving him of many of his new powers. He could no longer lift planets, or shrug off an H-bomb. He also became dependent on the sun for his power, like a reverse vampire. He gained some reasonable limitations. A superhero who can do anything turns out to be no hero at all. He's nothing specific, so he's nothing. He has nothing to strive against, so he can't be admirable. Being of any reasonable sort appears to require limitation. Perhaps this is because Being requires Becoming, as well as mere static existence-and to become is to become something more, or at least something different. That is only possible for something limited. A story can be built out of our limitation, out of our suffering only. Otherwise it’s no story at all. Even Christ had to undergo crucification, what are me and you? I am doing better now. I look forward to big things in life, which were unfathomable to me when I look back at myself. I found my resilience through my limitations. I decided my limitations to help me write my story and so can you. I find joy in simple pleasures of life. SO CAN YOU!