Rules? Do we really need more? Clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson says that if we hope to bring order from chaos in our lives then we definitely need the right ones. Many in our modern, scientifically advanced age are tempted to dismiss ancient stories and literature as rife with superstition and prejudice, but in 12 Rules for Life, Peterson’s approach is not dismissal but gleaning and synthesizing ancient wisdom that was hard-fought and dearly bought. Combining wisdom from the past with the latest scientific research from the present, Peterson gives some guidelines for transforming chaos into order.

For the past 350 million years, lobsters have engaged in the primordial ritual of jockeying for hierarchical dominance. They compete for the most secure territory, the pick of females when mating season heats up, and ready access to the choicest scraps of residual biomass that sink to the ocean floor. This is the lobster high life. Alas, this is not the tale for every lobster. Lobsters on the lower rungs of the dominance ladder actually go through life with a less dominant posture. They produce less serotonin—the chemical associated with happiness and well-being. The more failures that these low-rung lobsters encounter, the less serotonin their bodies produce, the less happy they feel and the more their claws begin to droop. Serotonin gets depleted and, with it, confidence.

It may dismay some people to learn that humans are not dissimilar from lobsters, and that the behavioral and biochemical parallels between humans and lobsters are uncanny. Deep beneath the cultural and social values we hold intuitively is a primal internal status detector which assesses our place within the human social hierarchy. It’s an impulse that’s older than the trees. We can’t socially evolve our way out of it.

Like lobsters, each of us has an internal sense of where we fall in the societal pecking order. If you find yourself feeling like a low-rung lobster, all is not lost! Thankfully, you have a choice: stand up straight and put your shoulders back. It might sound outlandish that postural adjustment can make a significant difference, but body language communicates a lot to others—and to yourself. If you’re hunched over, with head down, not making eye contact for fear of being viewed as a challenger, if you look anemic and impotent, then you will very likely come to believe the same. If you adjust your body to a position that’s more open—even just add a smile—then happy emotions tend to follow.

To stand up straight brings not just a psychological shift, but a metaphysical one: it is an insistence on owning your existence, your place in this world. It is a readiness to defend it, that you are willing to come at life with eyes wide open, leaping at challenges instead of bracing for a blow. It means putting aside the childish belief that life is but a carefree dream. Accept life and its inevitable difficulties and understand the sacrifices and vulnerability required to create anything meaningful.

You have every right to voice your opinions and preferences—just like the people you might meekly defer to sometimes. In doing so, you will start to feel more competent, and  people will begin to see you and respond to you differently.  Do this enough and that negative feedback loop that leads to an ever-dwindling serotonin drip and drooping shoulders,  will create a positive feedback loop, making you less socially anxious. This in turn increases sociability,  confidence in what you have to contribute, and openness to meeting new people.

So put your shoulders back, and have better posture. You just might find yourself moving from fretful bottom feeder to a confident, claws-up crustacean.

In old, small town America, times were simpler. People were far more likely to feel confident in their fields: the mechanic, a handful of teachers, and farmers, all living serotonin-drenched existences, confident in and appreciated for what they contributed. This could be why a disproportionate number of people excelling in their respective domains come from small towns.

In the wake of rapid urbanization, however, chances are you’ll end up somewhere in the middle of the heap, no matter how talented a musician, chess player, writer or athlete you are. We urbanites are keenly aware of our inadequacies, or at least that there are many others who are more talented than we. Talents and skills are not distributed evenly, nor are outcomes. What is more, even well-intentioned attempts to ensure equal distribution and outcomes tend to do more harm than good both to individuals and a society.

What is that voice inside us, that critical spirit that is quick to condemn us, that whispers (or shouts) that our mediocrity isn’t going to cut it. That voice can be a vital, invigorating call to action, but if it turns us inward and leads us to doubt the value and meaning of our efforts—it is prudent to stop listening. Wisdom is what is needed—not noise.

Part of the problem is that we operate by a false dichotomy of success and failure, instead of seeing a sliding scale. Furthermore, we tend to view life as a game we are either winning or losing. But there are many endeavors worth  fighting for, some of which you may be doing well at. It’s not just your career, but family life, broader social life, and other hobbies in which you’ve invested time.

Yet another point to consider is that some games are so unique to you that it makes no sense to compare your outcomes to those of others.  When we take an isolated quality in  someone else and make it the standard  by which we justify  our performance, we do ourselves and the person to whom we are comparing ourselves a tremendous disservice.

Awareness of deficiency is important and can be helpful, but self-flagellation gets us nowhere. We constantly view our lives at Point A, where we currently are, and Point B,  the life we desire, the life aligned with our deepest values. Before you move toward B, you must linger at Point A, and become an existential building inspector, taking stock of your soul’s architecture. Look honestly at the cracks, the shaky foundation, the pervasiveness of any mold or rot. Demoralizing? Not necessarily. Life is a challenge which becomes meaningful when we shoulder the responsibility of caring for ourselves.

See yourself as someone you can help, not tear down. Unlike the past, the future isn’t set. Start small, with an area of your life that you can add order to. Don’t be self-punitive. You’re not perfect. Just make it your goal that,  in some small way, you will make life less chaotic by the end of that day. What you aim for shapes what you see in the world. Aim for order.

You are on a journey of self discovery. Instead of being a dictator with an endless list of self-actualizing to-dos, make your goal increased awareness. As you learn to tell the truth and be content with ‘good enough’ in the present, this makes you less envious because you acknowledge another person has different strengths, but a different set of problems. Their strengths will never become solutions to your problems.

To strengthen society, the individual must be strengthened. Let it start with you. The world would be a far less evil place if people started doing this. Most people are eager to reform everyone and everything, except themselves.

Many people have questioned the value of life. The Russian writer Tolstoy, at the zenith of his career, stayed away from guns and ropes because he feared giving into the temptation to end “the stupid joke” that is life. Tolstoy ended up finding a reason to live, and we can as well, even in the midst of frightful pain.

Another Russian author, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,  who survived the terrors of Soviet gulags, or labor camps, appeared to have every reason to curse his captors, curse God, curse life, and end his own. But the way some of his fellow prisoners conducted themselves with grace and honor in the face of degrading treatment and dog-eat-dog survivalism so struck him that he began to take a long, hard look at his life, and how the decisions he’d made contributed to his current predicament. Once free, he wrote The Gulag Archipelago, a blistering critique of the gulag system and communism’s failures in the USSR.  By changing himself, he became someone who refused to compromise truth, and whose voice has inspired many to stand up to tyrannical regimes.  Solzhenitsyn once remarked, “You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”

So instead of spewing hate at abstractions like capitalism or the far left or that morally backwards group you’re tempted to demonize, stop for a moment and consider your own actions. Is your own behavior aligned with the values you believe the “bad guys” are so egregiously violating?  Act in a manner that you are proud of, that’s honorable—not one you’ll later be ashamed of. Bring peace to your own heart and household before you think about rearranging systems. It’s hubris otherwise.

By taking stock of your position, and seeking to take responsibility for your actions and life, you will experience real life, its heights and its depths. But you will no longer depend on the highs for a sense of significance, and the depths will become opportunities for enrichment rather than embitterment. Engaging in the process of the soul’s movement from corruption to moral order makes you better equipped to combat hell in the world because you’ve taken on the essence of hell: the soul turned inward on itself. Set your sights on the highest possible good in your own life, and you are bound to bring some of that goodness to others.

Without a mind that can unconsciously categorize the barrage of sensory experiences, we would be completely overwhelmed by what we see, hear, smell, feel, and taste.

We don’t, and can’t, therefore, perceive everything. This means we must exercise our wills to hone in on what matters. Our capacity for speech helps with this honing process. It allows us to differentiate the important from the irrelevant, truth from falsehood.

Precision matters. It separates what is from all the imaginary “Isn’ts” we are tempted to buy into. The Isn’ts have a way of taking on a soundness that we accept implicitly. By accepting them, we give these figments permission to terrify us. We are afraid to see what actually confronts us. We’re in the woods, and we assume that any sudden noise nearby is a ferocious animal. But if we turn  and confront reality, we might be relieved to learn it’s just a mouse or a bird. Sometimes what we find is in fact horrible, but you can count on it being far less so than the dragons and demons and other mental concoctions we fear.

There is a certain comfort in naming something and seeing it for what it is, even when the reality is difficult. By choosing to stand and face instead of evading, we stave off chaos. When we articulate the truth, we bring order to chaos. The monsters of past mistakes and current missteps thrive in the dark. By naming them, you drag them into the light and can deal with them decisively. They will seem less chaotic and nebulous.

Figuring out where you want to go in life without understanding where you are is an impossible task. Here, too, the ability to speak precisely about where you are clarifies direction. Precision and truth in speech keep chaos at bay.

Suffering is a problem that great philosophers and religious thinkers have grappled with throughout human history. Buddha’s philosophy begins with the question of where suffering comes from. A Christian views the cross as a symbol of ultimate suffering and the means by which suffering will cease. The Jews emblazon upon their people’s minds the memory of Yahweh’s delivering them from suffering in Egypt.

Given suffering’s pervasiveness, it is miracle that we continue to seek and sometimes find happiness and even thrive.

Both from Columbine shooters and Goethe’s devil-like character, Mephistopheles, many have concluded that it would be better that nothing had existed at all, that Eternal Emptiness is preferable to the toil and pain of life if it’s all snuffed out in the end.

Such nihilistic conclusions can seem sound. Murder and destruction may be more rational extensions of nihilism than many want to admit. Is there a cogent alternative to dealing with suffering? Can Being, that is existence, be justified? One thing is clear: the mere act of thinking  will not save us. Tolstoy and Nietzsche among many others tried to make sense of it, to justify it through thinking and could not. A better approach to justifying existence in the face of suffering is not thinking but noticing.

Noticing refers to the experiential side of life which is so often forgotten in crisis. This is why chancing upon a cat and choosing to pet it is a wonderful image of our relationship to Being: it is an unexpected encounter, and you never know what the interaction will be like. Will it ignore you? Run from you? Hiss at you? Or will it trot up to you and purr as it nuzzles its furry face against your hand for a moment before running down the street?

Don’t miss those small unexpected moments in life, even (and especially) in times of pain. They add zest to happy days and a balm on difficult ones. The cat on the street could be the sound of leaves rustling as the breeze picks up, a radiant sunset, or the music of children laughing. These are the things that sustain us.  So notice the cat and take the occasion to pet it. When you feel hopelessly turned inward and can’t stop the frenzied overthinking, let the cat take you out of yourself. These are necessary distractions that give glimpses of goodness amidst difficulty. They are the stars of hope that shine brilliantly against the grim night skies we encounter, if only we will look up and take notice.