I thought of these 39 rules as a nod to the 39 Steps, though not the Hitchcock thriller, nor the Buchan novel, but Bunyan’s metaphorical journey. You know, the one where the protagonist wades through muck and despair to reach the celestial city—a perfect allegory for modern life, except now the muck has been monetized, and the celestial city is behind a paywall. These rules aren’t a roadmap to salvation or self-improvement. Think of them instead as survival tips for navigating the swamp of grifts, hypocrisies, and bad-faith debates that masquerade as our culture. Each rule is a step, and with 39 of them, you might just make it out with your sanity intact—or at least with a sardonic smirk on your face.

1. Never trust a Jungian. They’ll explain your midlife crisis by blaming your inner dragon, then charge you for the privilege.

2. Assume every dogma hides a grift. If someone tells you they’ve found “the truth,” it’s probably in their $29.99 self-help book.

3. Never underestimate the bourgeoisie’s commitment to fascism. Better to goose-step into oblivion than give up a single stock option.

4. Stand up straight, unless you’re carrying the weight of late-stage capitalism. In that case, slump artistically.

5. Always fight chaos with order. Especially if that order involves scapegoating marginalized people for the mess you made.

6. Be a plausible denialist.

7. Pursue what’s meaningful, not what’s expedient. But if what’s expedient keeps the lights on, go ahead and chase it while feeling guilty.

8. Never debate someone who calls themselves a ‘free thinker.’ They’ve already won the argument by redefining logic as oppression.

9. Be precise in your speech—unless you’re defending a fascist, in which case, drown everyone in word salad. Ambiguity is the last refuge of the ideologue.

10. Accept that life is suffering—but don’t forget who’s making it that way. Spoiler: It’s probably the same people telling you to just “try harder.”

11. When in doubt, blame postmodernism. It’s a vague enough enemy to cover any argument, from bad art to failing democracies.

12. Beware of the man who calls himself an ‘intellectual dark web’ member. Chances are, he’s just mad his TED Talk application got rejected.

13. Remember: the system isn’t broken—it’s working exactly as designed. Just not for you.

14. Clean someone else’s room for a change. You might learn that their chaos isn’t a moral failing; it’s just three jobs and no healthcare.

15. Assume anyone who says they’ve ‘done their research’ has a YouTube tab open. Peer-reviewed studies are for suckers.

16. If you’re stuck, start a podcast. It won’t solve your problems, but at least you’ll feel like someone’s listening.

17. Never take life advice from a lobster. Unless you want to end up boiled in your own neuroses.

18. Don’t fetishize responsibility—weaponize it. It’s the only way to guilt the rich into paying for your crowdfunded surgery.

19. The free market isn’t free. It’s just got better PR than feudalism.

20. Be wary of anyone who calls their bad ideas ‘provocative.’ They’re just beta-testing fascism with nicer fonts.

21. Argue in good faith, but always carry a rhetorical crowbar. Some doors just won’t open any other way.

22. Self-improvement is a trap. The real win is convincing others that they need to improve while you cash in.

23. Embrace chaos—especially when it’s profitable. If you’re not selling fear, are you even in the self-help game?

24. Only follow rules you can monetize. Why change your life when you can just write a book telling other people to change theirs?

25. If it sounds like a cult, it probably is. Especially if they have merchandise and a Patreon.

26. Always side with the underdog—unless the overdog cuts you a better check. Principles are great until rent is due.

27. Don’t ask whether the chicken or the egg came first. Ask why they’re both working 70-hour weeks at minimum wage.

28. Call every failure a hero’s journey. That way, your bad decisions become “archetypal lessons.”

29. Invoke Nietzsche sparingly. He’s like hot sauce—great in small doses, but ruinous in the hands of amateurs.

30. If someone brings up free speech, assume they just got banned from Reddit. And for good reason.

31. Be cautious of people who “believe in merit.” They’re usually just hoarding unearned wealth while calling you lazy.

32. Treat self-help gurus like used-car salesmen. The flashier the pitch, the more likely the wheels are about to fall off.

33. Remember: every billionaire is a policy failure. But sure, go ahead and call them your ‘aspirational archetype.’

34. If someone uses the word ‘marketplace of ideas,’ run. It’s code for “I want to say racist things without consequences.”

35. Reject any ideology with an animal mascot. Whether it’s a lobster or an eagle, it’s never about the animal—it’s about the power trip.

36. If life is suffering, ask who’s profiting from it. Spoiler: It’s probably not you.

37. Never confuse ‘difficult to understand’ with ‘deep.’ Sometimes a word salad is just a really bad chef.

38. If you meet the guru on the road, sell him an overpriced seminar ticket. Gotta beat them at their own game.

39. The pursuit of happiness is a scam. The real money’s in selling other people on it.

Hyper-Legibility—an advanced tactic, a looped back shot of capitalism’s serum injected into the collective vein. A psychotropic modification to the human hardware, flipped on like a circuit switch by the flashing lights and persistent hum of content creation, consumerism, and digital leisure. You’re not just consuming anymore, you’re being consumed—hollowed out, rewired to run faster on the economic wheel, blind to the fact that the race is fixed and the prize is a ghost.

Picture it: A cavernous shopping mall, ceilings arched high to scrape the heavens, labyrinthine corridors that twist and turn, trapping you inside. The architecture isn’t just confusing—it’s designed to disorient, to break you down into a programmable cipher. The stimuli come at you fast, whirling around in a cyclone of signs, lights, smells, all calibrated to knock you off balance, to sever your connection to the primal hunter-gatherer instincts buried deep in your lizard brain. You came in with a purpose, but you’ll leave with everything you never wanted, everything you never knew you needed. You’re prey to your own impulses now, your senses hijacked by the system, by the architecture of desire.

The resistance is broken, bit by bit, through the steady, methodical application of the tools of the state—the Educator, the Healer, the Bureaucrat. The Educator shapes the young into hyper-competitive consumers, molding them with the lessons of a market that never stops shifting, turning them into soldiers in the economic wars. The Healer keeps their bodies ticking, prolonging their servitude, patching them up just enough to keep them in the game. And the Bureaucrat, that faceless specter, paves the way for technology’s relentless march, smoothing the transition from man to machine, from mind to algorithm.

What’s engineered isn’t the primal needs that once anchored humanity—the need for food, for shelter, for connection—but the satisfiers, the mechanisms meant to deliver on those needs. Only they don’t. They can’t. It’s Goodhart’s law in action—when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Traditional satisfiers are discarded like yesterday’s trash, replaced with new, shinier models—pseudo-satisfiers, glittering with promise, dead at the core.

Take fast food, that emblem of modern convenience. It appears to fill a need—quick, cheap sustenance in a world on the go. But it doesn’t satisfy hunger, not really. It’s a simulacrum, a false icon that numbs the pangs but never fills the void. Over time, it hollows you out, kills your ability to recognize true satisfaction, to seek out what might actually nourish you. It doesn’t just fail to meet the need; it corrupts your ability to ever meet it.

The system, the machine, it’s designed to keep you running in place, feeding on emptiness. It creates a world where satisfaction is an illusion, a mirage in the desert, always just out of reach. You think you’re consuming, but really, you’re the one being consumed—eaten alive by the very world you’ve helped to create.

Hyper-legibility, hyper-reality, hyper-normalization—each a glitch in the matrix, artifacts of bad design in the grand experiment of modern life. They’re the result of systems built not to satisfy, but to obscure, to sever us from the satisfiers that could address multiple needs simultaneously. Attending a concert, for instance, could be a rich tapestry of experience, weaving together nature, socialization, potential romance, and creative synergy. But hyper-legibility strips that away, fragmenting the experience into commodifiable chunks, optimizing it into something sterile and one-dimensional.

The generational rift looms large here—dichotomies feel dated, relics of a time when lines were clearer, and decisions simpler. Gen X, with its mix of cynicism and forgotten pride, lingers in the shadows, capable of embracing contradictions without resolution, a talent both admirable and damning. They know the game’s rigged but carry on regardless, holding onto the threadbare hope that something, somewhere might still make sense.

In the world of hyper-legibility, the traditional relationship between supply and demand is twisted into a parody of itself. Supply doesn’t just meet demand; it engineers it, crafts it out of thin air because without that constant creation of need, the whole system collapses. The feedback loop becomes a vortex, pulling reality into a spiral where supply becomes an existential threat. Demand isn’t organic anymore; it’s manufactured, manipulated, until we’re chasing after the very things that drain us, thinking they’ll fill the void.

Deception becomes the norm—making the insane seem sane, the unnecessary seem vital. Hyper-legibility is a tool of this deception, modifying our psyches to accept supply-driven realities that appear to meet our wants while actually deepening our needs. It’s the ultimate hack, where optimization isn’t about making life better; it’s about making the system more efficient at exploiting us.

As a musician, you see it in practice—literally. Every time you optimize your deliberate practice, you might hit a wall where you realize that optimization has taken you somewhere cold, mechanical. You have to unoptimize to reclaim the soul of the music, to rediscover the ineffable quality that got lost in the pursuit of perfection. It’s the same with life—hyper-legibility strips away the richness, and we’re left trying to unoptimize, to reconnect with something real beneath the layers of engineered demand and synthetic satisfaction.