Make your life easier with mindful rule breaking

Life is made up of rules. What rules should you follow? What rules can you break? I See, everyone was obessed about grades — and quite understandably so. At that age, grades seemed to be everything. It’s only when after you graduate that you realize that’s not the case.

Insead of caring about my grades too much, I spent all that time, effort, and mental energy improving my social skills, learning public speaking, and joining organizations. I learned what I thought was appropriate and useful, and got by just enough to get by on the rest.

As a result, my grades weren’t anything great.

But outside of college, I could get into job interviews with ease, was confident about my writing, and became passionate about pursuing further education. Most importantly, I realized that you can make money outside of the traditional 9–5 setup.

I’m one of the few people I know who enjoyed their college life — and still seem to be doing well after.

Life is full of these “soft rules.” These are things that most people follow but don’t know why. When asked, their most likely question is “Everyone’s doing it.”

In this article, I attempt to explain a framework that I’ve followed my entire life, which I call Mindful Rulebreaking: the art and process of finding which rules you can’tbreak, which rules you can break, and which rules you should break.

This article is my attempt at explaining how I take charge of my life and live less stressfully, by breaking rules. Let’s dive right in.

But First: Should You Be Breaking Rules?

Life is made up of rules, but not every rule deserves to be followed.

Some rules are there for our benefit and protection, sure. But some rules are there not for us, but for culture, tradition, or the benefit of others.

Mindlessly following the rules that society set for you will lead to an unexamined, unremarkable life. Your destiny will not be your own — it will be your parent’s, your company’s, or your country’s. You will be a dead fish floating down the river only given the illusion of swimming the current.

More than that, following every rule will make you fragile.

Because you’re following a path that others set, you are vulnerable to consequences not of your own making. You make yourself susceptible to society’s folly.

If society is going well (which rarely happens) your life will also go well. On the other hand, if society deteriorates (which very often happens) your life will also go terribly. You won’t get to choose at all.

On the other hand, mindfully breaking unnecessary and damaging rules will make you antifragile. Why? Because you own your path, the consequences of those paths, and the agency for choosing it.

Even if, in the worst-case scenario, the path that you chose was objectively wrong, it would still have been your choice.

You would have found one way that doesn’t work — you can find others.

But if you just mindlessly follow rules, you will never find the right path, only the next step that society laid out for you.

That is because society doesn’t have your best interests at heart — it has the best interest of thespecies at heart. Society is a self-preservation machine that sacrifices individual will for the great survival (not for the greater good), and it’s becoming more and more powerful. Simply following the path that others cut out for us will lead to:

• To an unexamined, unremarkable life
• To a life overly reliant on the structures, narratives, and aid of society, and
• To a life of vulnerability to chaos and disorder.

Breaking unnecessary and damaging rules will let you take control of your path, making you antifragile.

This is why I try to consciously break rules — but only the right ones. More on that later.

The Universal Laws of Rules, Agency, and Consequence

This mental framework is called Mindful Rulebreaking.

It’s the art and process of finding which rules you can’t break, which rules you can break, and which rules you should break. Before we can get into that, though, there are three premises that this framework rests upon:

• The Law of Rules
• The Law of Consequences, and
• The Law of Agency

Understanding these laws, which are universal to anyone, everyone, and anything, is fundamental to understanding the framework. Let’s discuss them in detail.

The First Law: The Law of Rules

Life is made up of rules.

Rules are everywhere. They are the seen and unseen guidelines for how we live our lives. Recognizing them is the first step to controlling them, so that’s what the First Law is all about. There are two sub-laws under the First Law.

First sub-law: Rules are everywhere

Every person, group, situation, social interaction, and institution has their own set of rules.

Legal laws are a great example. These rules are codified and formally recognized. Breaking them will result in specific punishments, as far as our imperfect justice systems can make them.

On the other hand, there are alsorules for daily living. These rules are sometimes spoken or codified, but often they aren’t.

A great example is school. At school, you are “supposed” to care about your grades. I have a close friend who got into the national university. We talked a lot because she would cry and break down every week like clockwork.

This was because, while we were at school, it was a “rule” to care about your grades.

Rules exist in every situation imaginable. There are rules for churches, workplaces, and parks. There are unspoken rules between acquaintances, workmates, friends, lovers, spouses, and family members. There are rules for interaction, non-interaction, and self-interaction.

There are rules for anything that you can think of.

Second sub-law: We all subconsciously follow the rules around us.

Even when we don’t think about it, we’re following rules every waking moment of our lives. Most of it is buried so deep that we don’t even think about it — and that’s good.

Rules are there to protect us from uncertainty. When we were children, our parents taught us rules to give our lives order and to protect us from the consequences of painful trial and error. Even as we become adults, our parents are still trying to teach us the rules they operate by.

As we grow up, we learn to look for these rules.

Some people are better at charting and following unspoken rules. Others do it instinctively, compelled by a sense of what is “right” they can’t quite name. Yet others struggle to discern rules and get branded as social rejects.

Regardless, we are all subconsciously following rules.

But while this is ultimately good, it also leads us to pretty dicey paths.

For example, the “rule” that everyone must go to college to enjoy a good future has not worked so well for everyone. Tons of people graduated college with nothing years of lessons they can’t use in real life, and tons of debt. Thus, it’s now a rule that many people are now trying to rewrite.

Recognizing that life is made up of these rules that we all subconsciously follow is the first important premise of this framework.

Acknowledgment is the first step to control.

The Second Law: The Law of Agency

You always have the power to choose but never the power to escape consequences.

Most people don’t realize this. Or worse, choose to ignore this reality.

You often hear people say “I didn’t have a choice.” For example, “Everyone was there, I had to go to the party!” or “I was raised this way, I don’t have a choice!”

But that’s wrong.

As soon as you realize your agency, as soon as you recognize your impact on the world when you were three and started putting objects into shapes, you were — have always been — making choices.

Let’s look at a more extreme example.

Say you’re a soldier in a war. Say, for one reason or another, you were captured by enemy forces and held at gunpoint. You have exactly two choices: surrender or die.

But those are still choices. You can’t say “I have no choice.” You can’t not make a decision, either. You know that silence will be taken as “death.”

If a soldier at gunpoint has a choice, why don’t you?

You never have “no choice.” You never “couldn’t do anything.”

The fact is, you only feel like you have “no choice” because of years and years of conditioning and biases that are clouding your thinking. Or the decision is difficult. The consequences might be painful, deeply uncomfortable, or don’t align with your expectations.

And maybe those big consequences are there for a reason. Maybe you’re right to feel pressured to lean into a particular decision.

But whatever the case, recognize that you always, always have agency — that you chose to make that decision.

The Third Law: The Law of Consequence

Choice = consequence.

Rules are everywhere, but of course, you can choose to follow them — or break them. We’re not robots. But, remember that these rules have consequences.

That’s what the third law is: recognition that, whatever the rule, and whatever your decision, — you can’t escape from the consequences.

For example, let’s look at dating. Say you fell in love with your friend’s ex (icky, I know, but bear with me). You have two choices and two consequences:

1. Date them = you find the love of your life, but you potentially destroy your friend’s trust and maybe even break up your friend group.
2. Don’t date them = you lose out on the love of your life.

This applies to every decision imaginable.

The consequences might be heavy, or hidden, or still a long way off. But they’re there. Whatever decision you make, there will always be consequences. Always. That is the third law.

Fundamentals of Mindful Rulebreaking

Mindful Rulebreaking is the art and process of finding which rules you can’t break, which rules you can break, and which rules you should break.

At this point, we already know the following facts:

• There are rules around us,
• Those rules have consequences, and
• We can choose what consequences to have but never escape from those consequences.

Now, the next step is realizing the fact that we have to break the rules.

From a young age, our parents and guardians taught us that we must always follow rules, and this is good. Their rules are there to protect us from ourselves, and chances are that every time we break rules we would hurt ourselves or others.

Yet as we grow older, mindlessly following the rules becomes more and more disadvantageous.

If we never break any of the rules that society imposes on us, we can do nothing but go with the flow. And the “flow,” the herd mentality of society, doesn’t always lead to good places. There’s a quote that perfectly summarizes this thought:

If you mindlessly follow society’s rules, you won’t end up anywhere good.

So then, how do you break free from this path?

The key is knowing which rules you should break to maximize the possible outcomes, in whatever aspects of your life you find yourself in. By learning this, you take control of your path and break free from unconscious limiting beliefs that you might be following.

For that, there are five key steps.

Step 1: Learn the Lay of the Land.

In the First Law, we learned that there are rules for every scenario.

The first step to Mindful Rulebreaking is therefore charting these rules. You can do that by:

• Determining the spoken rules. When rules are spoken, things become a matter of seeking them out. Find the rulebook, read the signs, or talk to people who know more than you.
• Observing the unspoken rules. When rules are unspoken, things become a matter of observation. See how the people around you think, act, and talk. Asking others is a last resort: there’s bound to be a reason the rules are unspoken.

Learn the spoken and unspoken rules.

Step 2: Determine the Hard and Soft Rules

Not all rules are created equal.

Some rules are “heavier” than others. Arguably, the core component of Mindful Lawbreaking is determining which of the important rules are, and which ones can be safely broken to maximize gains for you.

I call these rules Hard and Soft rules.

Hard Rules

These are the rules that you shouldn’t break. It has three characteristics:

1. Hard Rules have immense consequences that can change your life. An extreme example is killing another person, or even just being complicit in their death (like driving drunk). When caught, you will spend years in jail, if not your entire lifetime. Even if not, you will spend your entire life with a guilty conscience that can drive you insane.
2. There are hard rules for every scenario. In your job, for example, a hard rule might be talking back to the boss, (cost you your job.) In your romantic relationship, a hard rule might be to not go anywhere romantic with a member of the opposite sex (cost you your relationship).
3. Hard rules are personally imposed and socially imposed. For example, the legal (hard) rule to not take money from other people is socially (and structurally) imposed. You might also have a hard rule — something would risk you losing your sense of self. In other words, some hard rules are objective, and some hard rules are subjective.

Soft Rules

On the other hand, some rules are there as more of a general guideline — they don’t have as big of a consequence. There are soft rules that you should follow, and also soft rules that you can break.

It has three characteristics.

1. Soft rules are not life-changing. At most, they might result in minor inconveniences. When you break soft rules, your life doesn’t change. For example: In your job, there could be a “no chatting during work hours” rule — everybody breaks it. In your romantic relationship, a soft rule could be a gift limit. You likely won’t break up if you buy something worth $100 when the limit is $50.
2. Soft rules are often unexamined. Most people follow these rules but don’t know why. When asked, their most likely answer is “Everyone’s doing it.” For example, dating in college.
3. Soft rules are difficult to spot.While hard rules have big consequences but are easy to spot, soft rules have lighter consequences but are more difficult to spot because they masquerade as hard rules. For example: going to college.

Identifying soft rules and hard rules in any scenario is important because it will inform your strategy. But it can be tricky and requires a lot of introspection.

Step 3: Know Your Why

Why do you want to break a rule in the first place?

The third step is about examining your motivations. Ask your inner self why you don’t want to follow the current rule that you’re evaluating. Is it because it doesn’t “feel right”? Will it cost you to follow it? Or is it merely inconvenient for you?

Knowing your motivations is essential because of the consequences you will face.

Remember the Third Law: every decision will always have a consequence, and sometimes your decision to break a rule will result in some pretty significant things. Knowing your why can be critical to the decision to stick to your path.

Step 4: Count the Cost

Learn and evaluate the consequences of your actions.

Once again, remember the Third Law. Whatever you choose, you will always face consequences for your actions. It’s thus critical that you know what those consequences are so that you are not blindsided when it arrives.

Counting the cost will help you determine whether the rule is something you should break, can break, or definitely shouldn’t break.

Don’t be afraid to be both creative and methodological. You need a mixture of both for better evaluation — creativity will show you consequences that you might have never considered while being systematic (ie, doing research or searching online) will reveal objective facts that you might have not considered. AI is also helpful in this path.

Step 5: Commit to Your Path

Once you’ve made a decision, commit to it wholeheartedly. Nothing is more damaging than a half-assed decision, you can’t reap the benefits of either one.

Step 3 is crucial here. You need to know your internal motivations for your decision, and continually remind yourself that you made the right choice.

Mindful Rulebreaking for an Easier Life

Life is made up of rules, but not every rule deserves to be followed. Some rules are there for our benefit and protection.

Yet, Some rules are there not for your benefit, but for the sake of culture, tradition, or the i of others.

That’s why mindful rulebreaking is so important. Your time, resources, and energy are severely limited — we only have a short life to live. Following a predetermined path wastes our potential and limits the things we can achieve.