12 Rules for Life: Rule 12 Summary & Analysis

Peterson opens this chapter by making it clear that he owns a dog, a hypo-allergenic American Eskimo dog named Sikko, to be exact. Peterson talks about his dog first because of a phenomenon known as “minimal group identification,” which basically means that people show a strong preference for members of the group with which they identify. In other words, people like members of their own group and dislike members of other groups. So, Peterson didn’t want to alienate dog lovers by implying that only cats are worthy of being petted. He also approves of petting dogs!

As Peterson has discussed in earlier chapters, every major religion expresses in some form the idea that life is suffering. Once Peterson was speaking with a client who was facing devastating news about her husband’s cancer prognosis. Peterson has given a lot of thought to the vulnerability of small children. Dealing with a sick child forces a parent to do this. When his sunny daughter Mikhaila was two, his wife noticed that there was something odd about the little girl’s gait. A few years later, they both noticed that Mikhaila had grown sluggish and mopey. She moved like an elderly person and complained of pain. Eventually, she was diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. Thirty-seven of her joints were affected.

Peterson poses the question of what kind of God would make a happy little girl suffer like this. In The Brothers Karamazov, the character Ivan couldn’t accept a world where God allowed such suffering. Yet Peterson also realized that if he could theoretically fortify his children to make them invulnerable to suffering, they wouldn’t be his children—“what can be truly loved about a person is inseparable from their limitations.” This was easier for Peterson to recognize with his healthy son than his fragile daughter.

Eventually, Mikhaila became the first Canadian child approved to take etanercept, a new drug for autoimmune diseases. It was very effective. Since Mikhaila loved earning money, her parents offered to pay her if she could learn to administer the drug injections herself, so she’d have more independence. It worked, and within a few years, Mikhaila was symptom-free. In high school, however, she started having pain again and learned that she needed an immediate hip replacement.

When Peterson sat with his grieving client, the only thing he could share was “the tight interlinking between vulnerability and Being.” He also told her an old Jewish story about how an omnipotent Being lacks only one thing: limitation. According to the story, that’s why God created human beings—if there was no limitation, there could be no story, and thus no Being. Peterson doesn’t want to claim that this makes suffering okay somehow, yet he believes recognizing this link really helps in facing suffering.

Given that “being of any reasonable sort appears to require limitation”—that “Being requires Becoming”—what about the suffering that limits cause? It seems unbearable. But if we conclude that such a terrible world shouldn’t exist, we actually risk making life even worse—and there’s no goodness in that. Peterson argues that ultimately, the solution to suffering won’t be found by just thinking about it, or else minds like Tolstoy or Nietzsche would have figured it out. Rather, noticing, not thinking, is the key. The first thing to notice is that you don’t love someone despite their limitations, but because of them.

At a certain point, Mikhaila’s rheumatologist couldn’t do anything else for her pain, and her medications began to have serious drawbacks. Even after she was able to get a hip replacement, challenges persisted: her right ankle disintegrated, and the pain was so bad that Mikhaila became psychologically stressed. After a desperate search for a faster surgery date, she got an ankle replacement. The recovery was agonizing, and painkiller withdrawal was almost as bad.

During this period, Peterson and his wife learned a few things about dealing with suffering in the midst of life’s stresses. He suggests setting aside time each day to strategize about managing the illness or other crisis, but not thinking about it constantly. Otherwise, life will spiral out of control, and you’ll waste your limited energy. He also suggests “shift[ing] the unit of time you use to frame your life.” You can’t dream about the next decade when you’re in agonizing pain. Instead, you can make a courageous choice to “presume the primary goodness of Being” and concentrate on the day at hand.

Peterson returns to dogs and cats. While dogs are social and hierarchical, cats are different. Cats interact with people on their own terms. Peterson sees them as “Being, in an almost pure form.” You never know what’s going to happen when you encounter a cat. If you offer to pet it, sometimes it will run away. But sometimes it relishes being petted and invites more. When that happens, it makes a good day a little better, or else it gives you a momentary break on a bad day. If you pay attention, you might find other “small opportunities” like this throughout your day. You get a reminder, even if only for a few seconds, that “the wonder of Being might make up for the ineradicable suffering that accompanies it.”