Jordan Peterson’s meteoric rise to international celebrity ground to a halt after a series of harrowing health challenges that engulfed his entire family. The Canadian clinical psychologist returns to deliver a sequel to his wildly popular 12 Rules for Life.

The first book was about finding antidotes to life’s chaos: “Put your house in perfect order before criticizing the world,” “Stand up straight with your shoulders back,” and so on. Too much chaos is obviously harmful, but so is too much order. This book is about the dangers of too much stability and control, and the dynamism and meaning that can be lost when individual lives and societies become too rigid.

Here are 12 more rules that explore the theme: 

1. “Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement.”

2. “Imagine who you could be and then aim single-mindedly at that.”

3. “Do not hide unwanted things in the fog.”

4. “Notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated.”

5. “Do not do what you hate.”

6. “Abandon ideology.”

7. “Work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens.”

8. “Try to make one room in your home as beautiful as possible.”

9. “If old memories still upset you, write them down carefully and completely.”

10. “Plan and work diligently to maintain the romance in your relationship.”

11. “Do not allow yourself to become resentful, deceitful, or arrogant.”

12. “Be grateful in spite of your suffering.”

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Some of psychology’s pioneers focused so heavily on the individual that their works underestimated the importance of community in the formation of whole and healthy individuals. For this reason, when Peterson sees clients, he begins by probing not just into the inner world, but into their social worlds.

Are they close to their families?

Do they have close friends and a more general social circle?

Do they have a stable and gratifying romantic relationship?

What about a career or even just employment? Does it deliver some measure of satisfaction and purpose?

Does their education level match their goals and competence—or could they go further?

Can they clearly express their ambitions for the future and define the roadmap to get there?

Do they spend their free time in activities that are meaningful?

When the no’s pile up too high, it becomes clear that someone is not well-integrated into the social fabric. These are the people most likely to tip over the psychological deep end—and it’s unlikely they’ll land anywhere good.

Sanity is a social institution. Community has a way of reminding us (sometimes kindly, other times less so) how to speak and behave. This helps keep us mentally healthy. So instead of criticizing social institutions, allow them to critique you. Stop and pay attention to the feedback you get from others—verbal and non-verbal. It can motivate and prevent you from spiraling out of control. Staying absorbed in your sphere of movement—full of friends and family and enemies—rather than isolating and drawing into oneself, produces stress and annoyance, but it is worth it.

Society helps keep us sane because it shows us the codes to the social game, which we slowly ingest over time. It points us at certain goals and tells us to aim for them. Differences in skill and abilities inevitably yield differences in status, but striving to move ahead matters wherever someone may fall. A young waiter cornered Peterson at a restaurant to tell him that watching Peterson’s videos and reading his book had changed his perspective on his relatively low-status job—that being humble and content to pursue opportunities right in front of him, and doing them as well as he knew how—had made a huge difference in his life. He’d earned three promotions in just half a year. He had resisted the impulse to stay embittered at the bottom, and paradoxically, it had helped him rise.

There is, of course, a tension between order and chaos. Too much order is harmful, just as too much chaos is. It is a balancing act. We have to deal with a certain amount of arbitrary regulation for social life to continue. But at the same time, we must accept a certain amount of rebellion and creativity for rebirth.

Without some creativity and rule breaking, existing laws have a stultifying effect on societies and the individuals within them. And, of course, we can’t forget that today’s entrenched rules and regulations were yesterday’s creative rebellions.

Who are you, really? And who do you think you could be? It is easy to forget that, as a human being, you are unfathomably complex. There is nothing in the cosmos as complex as you except another person. And that’s just talking about who you are right now at this moment. It adds further complexity that you are engaged in an ongoing process of becoming.

Each of us has an intuition, even if we don’t have words for it yet, that we are full of potential that is greater than we can imagine. Whatever our vision of the possible is, it can be squandered through a lack of persistence and discipline or by unforeseeable mishaps and tragedy. But let’s put that aside, and envision for a moment the highest and best version of yourself. What is that self like?

Ancient and new sources of inspiration inevitably influence what we wish to become. Socrates believed that all our lives, we are not simply learning, but remembering what we already knew—ancient ideas about who we are that lie quiet until we discover them throughout life. As bizarre as it sounds, it’s not implausible to suspect that down in our very bodies and genetics, there is potential and wisdom that experiences activate or awaken. Then there are the new sources of inspiration that we incorporate into our vision of our best, ideal self: those novel things we want to investigate and somehow integrate into our lives and understanding. We are unique from other animals in that way, that we don’t necessarily repeat all the same behaviors as our ancestors without variation. Even chimps and dolphins play out the same ingrained patterns handed down through generations without any significant changes.

Story brings together the ancient, deep-in-the-bones understanding humans have in a way that is fresh and exciting—especially the unforgettable stories. The story of the Exodus, of the Israelite slaves escaping their Egyptian masters, is an example of a story with depth and complexity that we never get to the bottom of. It has inspired spiritual, social, economic, and political transformation across the world. Think of how blacks in the United States took hold of those truths and gave them new life as they longed for freedom millennia later.

These are the stories that are part of us, that shape our vision of who we could be and who is worth becoming—and who isn’t. As we learn about the heroes in many of these stories, we see they embody certain characteristics that we feel instinctually are worth mimicking. And more than simply aping those actions, we seek to take on the spirit of those actions.

Pick something worth aiming at: the best you can envision. Fumble your way forward in pursuit of it. Pay attention to the mistakes and miscalculations you make along the way. Be honest about them. Then do things differently. Know your own story: past, present, and what you’re heading for. Make a map as clear as you can make it so you don’t end up in the same rough spots over and over again.

As you seek for that profound (and hopefully, profoundly good) target, you will realize that you yourself are on an adventure, and your life is showing features of the hero’s quest. As you start moving, another path might be clarified which offers something higher, more complex than the path you’re on. If you are sure you aren’t just giving up on your current path, then go for it. The path to becoming that highest self that you envision is a serpentine, winding one. But the snaking path is the only way forward as your goals become increasingly complex, and you find yourself capable of taking on more and more.

In many intimate relationships, people tend to take things on the chin rather than confront them. “It’s no big deal,” or “I’m probably just overreacting,” or “It’s not worth it,” or “I’ll just do it myself—again…”: These are common rationalizations. But the trivial things are not so trivial if they happen daily or hourly. A clash of preferences or intuitions about the dishes, cleanliness, early morning etiquette, or spending habits is worth hammering out. If you choose not to address the recurring annoyances, they will continue. It’s not just about one moment. A marriage of 40 years means 15,000 days—15,000 days of the same habits and annoyances if things go unsaid. These little seemingly insignificant things that go unaddressed are straws on the camel’s back.

Ignoring them might make for short-term peace, but not true peace. Saying nothing is the equivalent of drifting through life on a rudderless boat. And of course, without a rudder, you probably won’t arrive at your desired destination. Thus, it is crucial that you know what you want so you know how to voice your preferences and negotiate them maturely.

If you stuff recurring annoyances, you will waste away in bitterness or boil over. Don’t let things hide in the fog. Sometimes people prefer to leave such things hidden because when they have walked through the fog and learned about themselves, others, and the world more generally, they haven’t liked what they’ve seen. Better to be ignorant and happy than wise but miserable. Of course, when we avoid the fog, we also forgo a deeper understanding of what we really want. Knowing what you want means holding on to some kind of hope as you pursue it or ask for it. But sometimes hoping itself feels too scary if your hopes have been consistently disappointed.

Abandoning issues to the fog is born of an unwillingness to notice and pay attention to our feelings and motivations. Instead of letting things stay hidden in the fog, admit the feelings, and identify them as best you can. This is different than giving into your feelings or acting out of your feelings, but many people make the opposite mistake of acting as if the feelings and desires don’t exist at all.

There’s something embarrassing about admitting to feelings that seem petty or weak—even if only to yourself. You open yourself up to the possibility that your feelings might not be proportionate to the situation, and that they could reveal deeper areas of inadequacy and neediness in your life. They could also reveal that you don’t see things for what they are. It’s a risk to admit those feelings.

The best thing to do is clear the fog. The light of truth will do this, but that will involve  walking through the fog to discover what is hidden. There is risk in walking through the fog. You don’t know what you’ll find. You may not like what you find. But you will fare better discovering what is there than responding to what may or may not be there.  

The price we’ve paid for teaching several generations to demand rights over the past half century is high. What makes life meaningful is not demanding or even receiving the demanded, but in assuming the inherent tragedy in the universe and bearing up against it by taking on as much responsibility as we can possibly manage. This is what will sustain us amidst suffering.

Assuming responsibility is what gives meaning to life, but as long as we shout for rights without shouldering responsibility, we will be looking for meaning in places where it isn’t found. The outcome of these existential wild goose chases is resentment, and generations emerging without any real defense against its embittering influence.

This loss of meaning we are now experiencing was predicted over a century and a half ago by thinkers like Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. Nietzsche, for example, anticipated the death of God. Many people think he made this prediction in a spirit of glee or triumph, but Nietzsche was despairing. He believed that the death of a robust monotheistic tradition would lead to nihilism or rigid, totalitarian thinking. For Nietzsche, the solution to despair over nothingness or the vice-like grip of a totalizing system lay with the individuals strong and self-possessed enough to develop their own values, boldly proclaim them in the face of a valueless universe, and uphold those values.

Nietzsche’s proposed solution of elevated humans or Übermenschen is probably impossible. History bears out pretty clearly that no one is self-possessed enough to create a sustaining value system out of thin air—let alone follow it faithfully. We are too full of biases and blind spots and our lives are too short to sort things out sufficiently. And even if we got rid of those, there’s still the problem of how society could function without any common ground between the value systems these elevated people developed. They’d be constantly at odds.

Nietzsche’s solution may not be possible, but his analysis of the problems that accompany the death of God is prescient to the point of prophetic. In the vacuum of modernist nihilism, totalizing systems of Communism and Nazism emerged—both outcomes that Nietzsche predicted.

The death of God has led to the emergence of the gods of ideology that continue into our own time: ultra-simplified frameworks that try to encompass all of reality and inevitably miss life’s complexity and subjectivity—and maybe life itself. The question of why people are poor, for example, is not a simple question—and there’s no simple answer. It’s not hard to list just a handful of significant factors: poor education, geography, alcohol and drug abuse, political and economic corruption, the common pattern of rich becoming richer and poor becoming poorer, fragmented families, high crime levels, lack of ambition, lack of a concrete plans for life, insufficient encouragement—these are just a few problems that contribute to the complex phenomenon of poverty.

But ideology takes complex phenomena and assigns simplistic explanations, and those explanations can become increasingly doctrinaire. Discussions of “factors” creep toward “causes,” and “causes” creep toward “cause.” There’s no doubt that life is full of villains, but they’re as diverse as life is complicated.

People who buy into ideology conveniently find that they’ve landed on the side of the angels. Everyone else starts to look increasingly ignorant or evil. But there’s wisdom to the maxim to take the log out of your own eye before taking the mote out of your brother’s. If you go through life without a certain amount of humility, you might just become a villain yourself.

Cleaning your room is no small thing. Especially when we think of our rooms more generally as those things in our lives that we have say over and can make less chaotic. It could literally be your room, or your yard, or personal finances, or your relationship with a friend or family member. People try to change the world when they have no interest in ordering the simpler, more manageable things in front of them.

It’s one thing to clean your room. It’s another to make it beautiful. It takes effort, but it really matters. We have to cut ties with the common assumption that art and beauty are optional or just frills and pretentiousness. Art is the foundation of civilization and culture. By choosing to make something in your life beautiful, you’ve created a bridge to transcendence. It’s an opportunity for commune with Being itself. Without this connection, life will feel unbearable and all its challenges will feel insurmountable.

Start by buying some art, something that resonates with you, even if you don’t understand why. The maxim “Man does not live by bread alone” captures things well: Of course we need food to live, but it’s not enough. We need beauty. It reintroduces us to the wonder of life. We can find it in art, in literature, in the spontaneous exuberances of little kids.  

Artists somehow manage to hold on to that childlike wonder and their works and vision help reacquaint us with the glories we lost touch with as we aged. Beauty has a way of restoring us, or returning us to what was lost or broken along the way. There’s healing in this. Artists (and young children, for that matter) show us things that exist beyond cynicism’s tainting grasp. We adults tend to adopt a pragmatic mode of living. Part of this is necessary if we are to accomplish tasks and discharge a growing number of responsibilities, but calculating and making things efficient mean we see just enough of life to accomplish what we need to get done. But many of us adults eventually wake up to the shells of ourselves we’ve become.

Art and beauty pull us out of the pragmatic rut. They re-enchant a world gone gray. Similarly, young children have a way of catapulting us into the wonder of the ordinary. There are lots of things in life that make it worth living: play, laughter, love, joy, friendship, intimacy, grace, truth, goodness. But beauty tops the list.

Resentment is a potent, poisonous cocktail of anger, self-pity, and vindictiveness. Why do we become resentful? To be fair, we are up against significant forces: life’s inevitable chaos, the caprice of nature that can harm us in all kinds of ways, and the crushing weight of culture that, while teaching you how to behave and get along in society, has also muffled important aspects of who you are. On top of that, you are an agent of chaos yourself. You have the capacity for cruelty towards others and yourself.

None of this justifies our resentment. These are simply the factors that make sense of its origins. But that’s not the whole story. We are not destined to become resentful. There are plenty of people who, in spite of all of these factors against them, decide not to give into resentment. Some of the people who have the most reason to claim victimhood and resentment are the least likely to take on the identity of victim—which leaves the door wide open to resentment. Those most likely to fall prey to victimhood and resentment are the pampered who overestimate their value compared to others, people for whom all the doors have been opened.

There’s usually a sense of indignation underlying the question, “Why me?” What seems implicit in that question is “Why not someone else? There must be someone out there more deserving of a cosmic comeuppance than I am, right?” But who would you offload your tragedy on? A friend? A colleague? A total stranger? Instead of feeling especially wronged, and that you are owed something, it is better to view tragedy and suffering as integral and inescapable parts of life.

If you don’t accept life’s inherent suffering, you will start to live like you’re an exception to the rule and like life owes you something for all your trouble. This leads to arrogance and deceit. These characters invariably get bound up with resentment if victimhood is nursed for long enough. Underneath deceptions great and small is a resentful spirit that attempts to justify the lies it tells.

Of course, all this does very little to assuage real pain and grief and sadness. It’s hardly a consolation, but it does provide a helpful safeguard against veering toward self-absorption and self-pity, which tend to make things worse—not better. When we accept suffering as an unavoidable aspect of existence, the world doesn’t become any less perilous, but we become braver. You have no idea how brave you could become if you bear what’s yours to bear—life’s pleasures and its pain.