Scandalous Rules for a Beautiful Life
When I was 22, I wrote about my contentions with success and purpose. At 23, I revisited the idea. At 24 and 25, I didn’t continue the tradition, because it was a rough time and I had nothing to say.
Now it’s 2025, and I’m 26, and everything has changed.
I am calmer in a permanent way because life is no longer daunting. I see it simply as an experiment in experiencing and creating. For the most part, that has been working out pretty well.
Over these years of exploring how to live a life, I have developed 13 philosophies of counterintuition that have gifted me access to an experience of the world that I — at least I — consider beautiful.
I hope you enjoy reading them.
I hope you don’t forget to steal one.
1. Lie more
You will never experience reality in its purest form, because you see the world through the lens of your lived experience and cognitive biases. Default biases usually look like: I’m not good enough. I’m ugly. I suck.
Since your relationship with the truth is condemned to be distorted, you are allowed to manipulate it in a way that feels good: I’m amazing. I’m beautiful. I rock.
Both may be lies. But if you pick the beautiful lie, it will make you more courageous, which will have a ripple effect on your life.
2. Don’t validate your pain
You will either live a life defined by the anger that you didn’t build the cage you were thrown into, or one defined by the discovery that the key has always been in your back pocket.
At any given moment, you are allowed to get bored of your own past and simply decide that it doesn’t affect you anymore.
Sartre said: “Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.”
3. Be unreasonable
Often, you will be faced with a diverging road. You can either take the path of control and pragmatism, or that of hope and delusional self belief.
There are no wrong choices. But the latter is the only viable path towards an extraordinary life.
The person you’re waiting to become is on the other side of one unreasonable choice.
4. Put down the book
We live in a world oriented towards consumption, but you cannot self-actualise by consuming.
You will have to create something — anything — and derive meaning from the act of creation in order to self-actualise.
The thing you create has no obligation to be good, or beautiful, or interesting.
5. Have an accident
More often than not, you will have to tinker, explore, wonder, and play to stumble upon good ideas and happy accidents.
To play, you will have to suspend control. To suspend control, you will have to learn how to have fun.
There is no prize for being serious. The great paradox of life is that suffering begets suffering and joy begets joy.
6. Unoptimize
A technocapitalist world will always tend towards convenience, efficiency, speed, and utility.
Every time you choose an impractical, slow, intentional, beautiful, or unoptimised way of doing things, you are saving the world — or at least a version of it that preserves humanity.
7. Do less
Every extraordinarily skilled or intuitive person I have ever met is a pattern-recogniser whose life is speckled with moments of quietness and observation.
Stopping and paying attention is a prerequisite to magic.
Mary Oliver said: “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”
8. Don’t think about yourself
If you are an intense, obsessive person who thinks and feels deeply, you can either direct your energy inwards — self-analysing, pathologizing, and interpreting — or externalise it by building a business, pursuing a hobby, or loving your friends deeply.
Go out, eat well, and worship the trivialities. The less you think about yourself, the richer your life will become.
Camus said: “You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
9. Try not to win
Non-traditional success is doing the thing you want to do. Ironically, doing this long enough will lead to traditional success.
This is why the person who is in love with the process will outperform the person obsessed with the potential rewards of outcome.
Cindy Lauper said: “Fame is a by-product.”
10. Be submissive
Every now and then, somebody will say, “I have a sudden, inexplicable fire to create this thing. I don’t care what people will think, I just need to do it.”
That project will become their best and most well-received work.
Become a slave to your ideas — submit to them completely, and worship them — because the closer the process of creation is to intuition than analysis, the better the outcome will be.
Rick Rubin said: “Avoid allowing analysis to undermine inner knowingness.”
11. Be kooky
If you are doing something different, radical, and important, the curve of your growth will look flat for years. Then, it will rise exponentially.
Most people give up in the flat stage because they do not have the ability to self-validate. You, however, need to develop a kooky, stubborn, and dangerous kind of faith in yourself — one which lets you laugh at the people who don’t get it.
Get kooky enough, and failure will begin to taste like the anticipation of success.
12. Be a rule-follower
The universe abides by laws of physics. Bodies abide by laws of biology. Everything follows a system.
If you do not create your own systems for how a life is lived, you will be condemned to follow someone else’s rulebook.
Freedom is not the absence of rules, but the authorship of them.
Ocean Vuong said: “There is nothing more oppressive than a future that has already been imagined for you.”
13. Let the pain excite you
Painful, confusing, and overwhelming experiences — specially those that feel like pivotal crises — almost always serve a future purpose that is impossible to fathom as they occur.
What hurts now will feed something later. Since time is not linear, but circular, it will alchemize your pain.
So fall in love with the anticipation — because you are not as in control as you think.
Hafiz said, “I wish I could show you, when you are lonely or in darkness, the astonishing light of your own being.”
I’m glad you made it here.
And I hope you have a beautiful, scandalous, wildfire life.
