RULES TO LIVE BY
1. The Golden Rule. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you is the basis of God's evolutionary inclusion of ethics into the evolutionary process. We all do inherit ethics, and like other inherited characteristics it varies. But the capability of being ethical is universal in human nature. There is no logical reason to believe that ethics, like all other evolutionary characteristics of life, is not an evolving characteristic.
2. Live and let live. The basis of God's created evolutionary process is diversity, chance, and competition. All of it is necessary for the process to work and none of us are exempt. Appreciation of diversity is to understand the meaning of the process of life which began billions of years ago. Progress thrives on diversity. To live life with a chip on your shoulder because others are different is a useless and unrewarding approach to life.
3. Let your politics and ethics be focused on the less fortunate. Circling the wagons only around the best interests of yourself, your family, your own inherited religious cult, your own country are all unethical and incompatible with a contented life. A mentality of 'us vs them' is not a path to peace of mind. Others need count as much as yourself. In practice that means whatever amount of money you spend on yourself past basic needs should be matched by the amount of money you spend to help the less fortunate. The money can be spent immediately or put aside for distribution on death. Those who do this will sleep well nights. Fair is always fair.
4. Honor the right to dislike. Everybody can't like everybody or even somebody necessarily forever. People change, people have different personalities, circumstances change, current relevancy to someone can change---change is inherent in the process of life. The blame game in spent personal friendships/marriage is a waste of time. If you reserve the right to dislike someone they are entitled to the same right. Marriages and friendships often go different directions. Part of life. Deal with it. Never take it personal. Deal with the cards still in your hand, not the ones that got away during the card game of life.
5. Never give others the short end of the stick. I had a relative who told me often that the success to life is to be sure, in every relationship, that the other person always gets the short end of the stick. You do this and you will pay a price in personal contentment, bad attitude, and a high anger level. Those who do the right thing, the most often, reap a higher level of contentment in their life.
6. Empathy with others pays high dividends in terms of personal contentment. The alternative is to be constantly angry at others for reasons real or imagined. Others too are trying hard, in their own way, to understand the meaning of life. We all are overwhelmed by this task. We all are truly in the same evolutionary boat.
7. Avoid interest payments. The only thing I ever bought on credit was my first car. If a person adds up all the interest they paid on credit purchases, their wealth over time could have been doubled. The sooner one learns that enough is as good as a feast, the more personally and financially enriched his/her life will eventually be.
8. Don't try too hard to make sense out of love or sex. Love is powerful but stressful; human sex is beyond logic, reason, or intelligent design. Perhaps it proves God has a sense of humor. Sexual drive and the practice of specific sexual acts are hopelessly variable and sometimes get out of control. Whatever fits so well at a given time with love or sex may change with time. Give it your best shot, and let it go at that. Drop being judgmental about the sex lives of other adults. It has no real relevance to anyone but them. It certainly doesn't affect your own sex life or marriage.
9. Accept your life is controlled by God's created laws of evolution, not inherited human religious dogmas, not God wanting you to pray for Him to do the right thing for you or for others, or for forgiveness, or for help, or any other favors. Diversity, chance, and competition rule. Accept that and play fair. Relax. We're all dead in the long run. For some of us who are older it will be the short run.
10. Friendships are mostly contemporary, not forever, and depend on mutual current interactions. Reunions are proof that you can never really go home again. If you want to bore yourself to death pretend otherwise and spend a lot of time with meaningless banter with those from a past which no longer exists.
11. Never argue over personal tastes in music, food, religion, sex, hobbies, or lifestyles. In other words don't try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and it irritates the pig.
12. Learn to appreciate nature. You are part of it whether you choose to be or not. To be alone in nature settings and let your thoughts wander is to best understand the meaning of life and your place in the evolutionary process.
13. Do not depend on others for personal contentment. To feel least alone when alone is the best assurance you can weather conflict, change, and health set backs. Let others be your support only to the degree they do so on their own. You can't force people to like you and you need to have a life independent of support from others. We all know the 'others' in life can die, move away, be busy, change their interests and disengage from you for any number of reasons. If your ethics are in order you will always have sufficient support from others. The others will just change as your life changes. Especially in your terminational years you better be able to be content without depending on others to make you content.
14. Develop the wisdom to know what should be changed, what can be changed, hope for the strength to bring about any needed change, and have the understanding as to what cannot be changed.
15. Learn in your formative years, produce in your productive years, and observe in your terminational years. Keep life simple.
16. Be intrigued and see humor in almost all human diversity, appreciate diversity or risk being angry most of the time at most people.
17. Never miss the opportunity to make a minority of any kind (except criminals) feel comfortable in a majority setting. What goes around comes around and we all will be a minority often enough. Don't fall into the silly trap of blaming minorities for all your problems in society.
18. Have pets. Pets bring a special kind of loyalty, acceptance, and bonding unmatchable from any other source.
19. Be independent but always friendly. To be otherwise, or depend too much on others for contentment, is to increase the likelihood of endless frustration, disappointment, resentment, irritation, and contentious conflicts.
20. Protect your health. Practice preventive medicine. Exercise, weight control, nutrition, rest, and moderation in most things ensure a better health down the road.
21. Find time to develop your own thoughts about life. Don't spend too much of the day in useless social banter at the expense of giving your own thoughts to the more weighty issues of life. Avoid too many social gatherings where you spend hours engaging in inane banter about silly ass things with people you will seldom or never see again. There is no meaningful understanding of life or contentment of achievement from such gatherings. Some need this more than others but everyone needs to curtail overdoing this waste of time.
22. Don't get suckered into, or take too serious, a lot of anecdotal science or inherited faith based religious dogma. The damage from this kind of 'braces on your brain' existence is self inflicted and turns one into some kind of Don Quixote chasing windmills. A life lived via illusions is a life hollow and unfulfilled. No one ends up contented with a life driven by illusions. When the illusions collapse, it is like Humpty Dumpty falling off the wall. Who will put Humpty Dumpty back together again?
23. Be realistic about your own strengths and weaknesses. Seek situations which play to your strengths. Those who admit when they don't know something or have inadequate talent to achieve something will more likely get help than those who pose as something they are not in a given situation.
24. When all else fails, to Hell with it.
25. In social situations it is ok to humorously pick on your friends strengths, but dangerous to pick on their obvious weaknesses. Name calling of the indefensible type is guaranteed to create permanent destruction of a friendship. In an argument to call someone an idiot, a liar, some sort of sexual deviate, untrustworthy, etc. will invariably terminate any friendship, and this really reflects your own inability to win any argument via reason and logic. No one with reason and logic at their disposal is going to resort to such desperate verbal assaults. It is really low class: "You are an idiot". "I am not an idiot". What an enlightening exchange, as in the case of all such variants. Never waste time discussing any matter with anyone whose response is along these lines.
25 sounds like a good number to stop at. Obviously the above represents only the rules to live by I can think of at this moment in time.
