12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

the adults in their lives had become so naively overprotective that they deluded themselves into thinking that not talking about suffering would in some way magically protect their children from it.

didn’t give Moses “The Ten Suggestions,”

all cultures have created stories to help us grapple with, and ultimately map, the chaos into which we are thrown at birth;

people would sacrifice everything for an “identity,”

she survived Auschwitz by disobeying his order to join the line with the elderly, the grey and the weak, and instead slipping into a line with younger people. She avoided the gas chambers a second time by trading food for hair dye so she wouldn’t be murdered for looking too old.

hundreds of millions were murdered in the name of utopia. It took getting used to,

the myth of the hero, a cross-cultural theme explored psychoanalytically by Otto Rank,