Tell the truth, or at least,....................

..............................don't lie.   A few excerpts from Rule 8:

     Taking the easy way out or telling the truth - those are not merely two different choices.  They are different pathways through life.  They are utterly different ways of existing.

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     A naively formulated goal transmutes, with time, into the sinister form of the life-lie.  One forty-something told me his vision, formulated by his younger self:  "I see myself retired, sitting on a tropical beach, drinking margaritas in the sunshine."  That's not a plan.  That's a travel poster.  After eight margaritas, you're fit only to await the hangover.  After three weeks of margarita-filled days, if you have any sense, you're bored stiff and self-disgusted.  In a year, or less, you're pathetic.  It's just not a sustainable approach to later life.  This kind of oversimplification and falsification is particularly typical of ideologues.  They adopt a single axiom:  government is bad, immigration is bad, capitalism is bad, patriarchy is bad.   Then they filter and screen their experiences and insist ever more narrowly that everything can be explained by that axiom.  They believe, narcissistically, underneath all that bad theory, that the world could be put right, if only they held the controls.

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If you betray yourself, if you say untrue things, if you act out a lie, you weaken your character.  If you have a weak character, then adversity will mow you down when it appears, as it will, inevitably.  You will hide, but there will be no place left to hide.  And then you will find yourself doing terrible things.
     Only the most cynical, hopeless philosophy insists that reality could be improved through falsification.

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With love, encouragement, and character intact, a human being can be resilient beyond imagining.

-Jordan B. Peterson,   12 Rules For Life:  An Antidote For Chaos