1. Stand aside for The Optimist, Peterson

“1. Stand up straight with your shoulders back

2. Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping

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

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

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

6. Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world

7. Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)

8. Tell the truth – or, at least, don’t lie

9. Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t

10. Be precise in your speech

11. Do not bother children when they are skateboarding

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

These are Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life. While I wouldn’t touch his book if I were a 10-foot Jerzy Kosiński, I can nevertheless distill the statements, minus explanatory essays, to this essence: Act like the consensus noble grown-up whether you can be it or not. (With a different slant is Rule #5, which on its face assumes, against millennia of evidence, the parent’s criteria for judging his child are right.) This is lousy wisdom for a psychologist, such as Peterson is. In the therapy room, one doesn’t expect an injured, immature person to man up package-perfect until he has psychically healed to some extent.

These, however, are celebrated rules, as Peterson is star-quality in many places. For the New Year, I want to provide some uncelebrated and stronger rules.

1. Take time, a good bit of time, alone (not in therapy) looking inward. Ditch all your attitudes, positive and negative, and your beliefs, which cover over what you really are. Who you are is a mess of experiences with body feelings that are unlikely to be what you have labeled them. Without attitudes and beliefs and labels – with silence – you’ll see the true underground cavern and become insightful about yourself.

2. Aim the dark flashlight of this wisdom at your motivation, or lack of it. Why are you doing what you do, job or career? Do you have a reason better than this, to do something different?

3. Go to depth therapy and open up about your mess. You need a therapist who knows to normalize it (we’re all so messy under the veneer). Have good knee- and elbow-scraping conversations, chest-scraping head-jarring conversations. Leave if you see mood lighting, lots of tchotchkes and art.

4. Know that morality is merely codified love and decency, and like self-esteem, must be born in childhood to be present, and like self-esteem, can be faked. If you lack this goodness, stay in depth therapy.

5. Don’t be suicidal until you have lowered your expectations, realistically and wisely, to the point where the pain is generally duller than the positive you can glean, at times, from your existence.

6. With the intelligence you have learned, see if you are good enough for your spouse. That’s the start of knowing what to do about your relationship.

7. If Jordan Peterson encounters an innocent-looking pit bull on the street, invite him to pet it.