Day 111 - 1:08pm, 21 April 2019
Given that "chaos" is the adjective that best describes how I feel about the state of the house at the moment, I am reading the book The 12 Rules for Life: an antidote to chaos. Peterson's first rule is to "stand up straight with your shoulders back." He illustrates this with a lesson on lobsters and dominance. If a lobster loses a fight with one of its kind, its brain dissolves and then it regrows as a more subordinate brain, in keeping with his lower status. As a result, a stable hierarchy of lobsters emerges and there's less need to jockey for position and so potentially mortally wound yourself in a fight. A lobster can trace its lineage back, in theory, to the time of the dinosaurs.
So then the author explains that each of us has "an unspeakably primordial calculator, deep within you [which] . . . monitors exactly where you are positioned in society." And it turns out that being lower status isn't good for us human critters either; we should all be aiming for the top lobster post if you want to be happy and successful. If you slouch around and look like a defeated lobster, then that primordial calculator inside us assigns us a lower dominance ranking, which means our brain produces less serotonin and we are less happy.
The moral of the story is to be more lobster: stand up straight with your shoulders back and feel the happy chemical flowing.
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