12 Rules for Life

Be precise in your speech. When humans look at the world, we only perceive enough to allow us to get by. We live within the boundaries of this “enough.” We unconsciously simplify the world in order to survive, and we mistake that simplified version for the world itself. But when we look at things, we don’t actually see objects, but their “functional utility.” That’s why it’s so important for us to be “precise in our aim.” If we don’t do that, we’ll be overwhelmed by the world’s complexity.

Our illusion that we perceive the world sufficiently only works as long as life goes according to plan. When things are going okay, we see accurately enough, and it’s not worth it to examine things in greater detail. For instance, to be a good driver, you don’t have to understand a car’s inner mechanisms. But if the car quits working, the resulting uncertainty becomes a source of anxiety. When any kind of crisis occurs, that’s when we realize “the staggeringly low-resolution quality of our vision.”

When life breaks down, you suddenly become aware of what you’ve safely ignored before. Chaos rushes in, and you realize what precise aim normally protects you from. For example, when there’s been spousal infidelity, even the past is no longer what you once assumed it to be. When our vision proves insufficient, where can we look?

When the world falls apart, we see chaos, like the biblical abyss out of which God originally created everything. It’s “emergency,” the sudden manifestation of something unknown. Our bodies react faster than our minds do, thanks to instincts honed over millions of years. First, you freeze, and then your body floods with adrenaline, and you draw on physical and mental resources that—if you’re lucky—you’ve been saving up for just such an emergency. Before the known and familiar can reappear, you have to piece together the chaos.

Peterson says that, often, chaos wants to be noticed. It happens, for instance, when resentments pile up over a long time, but they’re ignored, because talking about them would bring up painful emotions. And from moment to moment, that’s easier, but meanwhile, the “dragon” keeps on getting bigger in the background. But one day, it shows up in a form that nobody can ignore and shakes the foundations of your life.  Peterson says we should never “underestimate the destructive power of sins of omission.” In reality, there are many things, especially in a marriage, that are worth short periods of miserable conflict for the sake of truth in the long run.

Peterson says that all a couple has to do to ensure that their marriage fails is “nothing”—just passively avoid confronting chaos. People avoid conflict because they don’t want to face the “monster” lurking beneath it. It’s more comfortable to refuse to think about things. But that doesn’t mean they go away. You’re just trading knowledge of your specific flaws for a longer, unspecific list of your potential flaws. But this isn’t worth it, because when you know reality, you can master reality. Of course, facing reality might mean getting hurt—but that doesn’t mean it’ll be fatal.

Specifying what a problem is makes the problem solvable. But to specify a problem, you have to admit that it exists. It opens you up to pain, but you’ll learn from the pain, instead of drifting through life with a vague sense of failure. People also refuse to specify because if they don’t define success, they won’t have to define failure, either, and face the pain of it. But that doesn’t work, because you’ll still feel disappointed in Being. Sorting through the mess of the past, present, and future might nearly kill you, but it’s necessary if you hope for rebirth. You have to “separate the particular details of […] specific catastrophe from the intolerable general condition of Being.” After all, everything didn’t fall apart—specific beliefs and actions failed. How can these be fixed? Unless you look at them specifically, you’ll never figure it out.

When things do fall apart, it’s possible to reestablish order through our speech, if we speak precisely. Once you’ve sorted things into their proper places, you can set a new goal and figure out how to get there. If you don’t, the fog never lifts.

Both the soul and the world are organized through communication. Even when things collapse, the possibility of new order exists, but “courageous clarity of thought […] is necessary to call it forth.” You do this by admitting the problem as early as possible. It’s only by sorting through the chaos that we and the world can be transformed. Precision is powerful because it separates what’s actually happened from what might happen. For example, if you hear something in the forest but can’t see it, it might be a tiger. But if you turn and look, you might discover it’s only a squirrel. As long as you refuse to look, it might as well be a dragon. Actual fears can be faced, even when they’re terrible, but fears in the imagination can’t.

If you avoid the responsibility of confronting chaos, even small doses of chaos, then reality will become more and more chaotic. Therefore, Peterson says, it’s important to search for the correct words about yourself. When you speak clearly about present realities, the future can be better. If you don’t, you rob yourself of your future. But if you choose to identify things carefully, you can make those things “viable, obedient objects”—you simplify them, making them useful things that you can live with. If you don’t do this, then everything remains vague and undistinguished, and your world will remain unmanageably complex.

Peterson says that one reason couples stop communicating is because they don’t define the topic of a conversation. Thus conversations become about everything, and that’s just too much. Every argument becomes about everything that’s ever been wrong between them or might be wrong in the future. But if you can identify precisely what you’re unhappy about and what you want—using precise speech to do so—the chaos can resolve into order.