The Instructions

Life should come with an instruction manual. For my daughter, I’m going to do my best.

People have been working for a pretty long time to figure it out, and there’s a few things pretty much everyone agrees on. Not much is true, but what is truly true is true of almost everything.

So why hasn’t anyone taken the time to collapse centuries of thought into a radically simplified guide to being a person?

That’s what I’m attempting here.

This is a sort of TL;DR for all the thought that precedes us (and that I’ve found useful). There are many people who are wiser and smarter than me who have dedicated their entire lives to things I distill down into a single sentence or even a phrase.

I just hope that I’m doing them some degree of justice.

I’ll list their work as I talk about it. I’m also putting together a master list of everyone that influenced this. Sometimes, it’s impossible to say where an idea came from exactly, but it's all essential.

I started this project before my daughter was born, and now she’s already two and a half. It’s all for her - a shortcut to understanding the strange world we brought her into.

I hope it’s helpful to others too.

I know it‘s been helpful to me.

There’s a lot here - you can read it all in the archive if you like. I’ll also be sending it out weekly if you’d like to pace it out in your inbox.