Here ya go!

If you want your life to work, assume no one else will do it for you. There is no cavalry, no benevolent institution, no system designed with your best interests at heart. You are responsible for your own outcomes. This means making decisions with full accountability, accepting consequences without deflection, advocating for yourself, and taking action.

Free will is an illusion. The best you can do is embrace personal agency. You might not be driving this train, but you can run in the aisles and mess with the conductor while you're on the journey.

Question everything, especially your own assumptions. You don’t get to be sure about much, so be skeptical when you, or anyone else, are certain about anything. The world is full of systems that are either incompetent, self-serving, or both. Politicians aren’t making policy for you. Corporations aren’t innovating for you. Technological advancements aren’t for your benefit unless you make them so. Reality itself is a post-hoc interpretation of lossy sensory data. Engage strategically: extract value when possible; refuse to be consumed by it.

On systems: Use them, don’t let them use you. If a structure serves your purposes, leverage it. If it doesn’t, bypass, replace, or lose it altogether. Understand its mechanisms well enough to manipulate it, but don’t become dependent. The moment you need a system to function as advertised, you’ve already lost.

Comfort is overrated. Pain, exhaustion, and difficulty are not things to be avoided; they are lessons to learn from. The sooner you accept suffering as a baseline condition, the less power it has over you. If something hurts, sit with it. If something is difficult, do it anyway. The trick is not minding that it hurts.

Competence matters. Respect skill, execution, and deep knowledge. Anything else is noise. If you find someone who knows what they’re doing, pay attention. Otherwise, move on. Expect nothing from people and you won’t be disappointed.

The absurdity of all this should not be lost on you. Nothing is made better by taking it too seriously. Deploy humor, maintain detachment, and, when necessary, laugh in the face of dysfunction. If you can’t escape the bureaucracy, at least don’t dignify it with undue reverence. Irony is armor.

Don't worship others. Be skeptical always, but be especially skeptical of people who believe they need to teach you something.
Don't subvert your intelligence or capacity for critical thought to fear or greed.

Detach from outcomes. Plan, execute, move forward, but don’t hinge your identity or well-being on things working out a particular way. That’s a recipe for misery. Be intentional, but not delusional. Control what you can; let go of what you can’t.

Technology and media are tools of control. Don’t make it easy for people to use them on you. Surveillance, algorithmic manipulation, corporate overreach aren’t hypothetical scenarios, they’re the environment. Engage when necessary, evade when possible. Assume every interaction feeds a model, every click refines a prediction. Starve and confuse the machine when you can. 

Don't let conventionally attractive people on screens spoon feed you their truth.

Have a long-term perspective, but focus on short term outcomes. Everything decays. Stability is temporary, chaos is inevitable, and entropy always wins. Any structure that matters to you, whether it’s a relationship, a company, or a personal project, requires maintenance. If you aren’t actively keeping it functional, it’s falling apart.

Every rule, assumption, and way of being is open to rewrite. No matter how ingrained a pattern appears, it is ultimately a product of your or someone else’s prior choices. Nothing is immutable. Social norms, habits, identities, expectations, these are all just patterns reinforced over time. If a rule doesn’t serve you, change it. If an assumption doesn’t hold up, discard it.

If you have children, if people rely on you, leave them something better than what you started with. It’s not enough to claim agency for yourself; protect it for the ones who come after. Our role as parents is to demonstrate to our children that forcing this human experience upon them, without their consent, was a good idea. Rewrite the rules not just because you can, but because failing to do so leaves the next generation trapped in the old ones.

Avoid ideological purity. There is no perfect system, no grand unified theory of how to be. If something works, use it. If it doesn’t, discard it. Allegiance to a framework is just another way to surrender your agency. Don’t ever do that.

Pay attention.

Tl;DR Operate with realism, not delusion. Assume incompetence, expect inefficiency, and plan accordingly. Prioritize action over complaint, competence over consensus, and endurance over comfort. If you must deal with a broken system, at least make it entertaining.