Sheer malevolence motivated me to seek this book out.

I had heard so much about this book that I honestly couldn't take ONE more person wanting to rave to me about Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life. My soul filled with pure, distilled hatred, I meant to get my hands on this book and systematically rip it apart line by line. In my resentment I just knew that the book HAD to be trash and I set out to prove it.

I still stand ready to kill anyone attempting to slobber their adoration for this book all over me. (It's fine if you like it! Just don't talk to ME about it.) Unfortunately, I can't exactly write the scorching, acidic review that I was hoping to write, either. The problem with this book is that it's massively bloated, rambly, and long-winded, not that its main premise is wrong.

The central idea of 12 Rules for Life is just that: Peterson puts forward 12 rules by which to live. He believes that these, if followed, will grant people meaningful, fulfilling lives. If you're expecting, like, psychology or brain science, there's hardly any of that here. This is more of a self-help book, along the lines of The Happiness Project, if it were written by an extreme intellectual who spends all day pondering philosophy.

The rules themselves are almost wholly unobjectionable, and you would hear them in one form or another from any source of worthwhile life improvement advice. Things like "assume the person you are listening to might know something you don't" and "compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not who someone else is today" and "make friends with people who want the best for you." Who could have a problem with things like that? Not me. The three stars I gave this book are for the two or three pages in every chapter where Peterson dishes out valuable and hard-hitting perspective shifts.

One of his foundational premises is that meaning instead of happiness should be the goal of life. Life involves suffering, he says. The way people seek happiness is to throw themselves into momentary feelgood experiences and flee from suffering, which only leads to a cycle of being increasingly more anxious and self-destructive. Meaning, which truly makes life bearable, comes from doing worthwhile things, pushing yourself, and growing. This is unfortunately true, even though I hate it.

Taking responsibility? "Volunteering" for life? Practicing gratitude instead of hiding behind protective nihilism? Disgusting. Ridiculous. I don't enjoy the fact that he's right, but I can't deny it.

Now, if he only spent two or three pages of chapter actually discussing that chapter's rule, what did he spend all the rest on? If you're wondering that, I can't tell you. I honestly don't know.

He talks... a lot.

Peterson likes archetypes and symbolism, so I will outline for you an archetypal 12 Rules for Life chapter:

1. Amusing or personal anecdote introducing the rule.
2. General explanation of the rule
3. Something about Freud or Jung (or both) and the primordial depths of the human psyche
4. Men and women are very different and here is how and why (it's about breeding and reproduction)
5. Genesis 1-4
6. Sociobiological theorizing linking modern people's behavior to the life of a long-ago genetic ancestor (IT'S ABOUT BREEDING AND REPRODUCTION)
7. Communism, fascism, and a book called The Gulag Archipelago
8. DOMINANCE HIERARCHY
9. One or two pages re-summarizing the rule but not really tying it back to anything else

Salt to taste and blend until smooth, and this list makes up the content of basically any given chapter in this book. Why is Genesis 1-4 necessary to cover in a chapter on "treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping"? I may just not be subtil or sophisticated enough to understand the complex philosophy going on in these thirty-page chapters, but I cannot escape the conclusion that Peterson could have written 70% less and had a better book. I hope you can see what I mean.

The genuinely problematic things are sprinkled in sparingly:

• Peterson's ideology is that through hard work and good character you can morally redeem humanity and make the world into Paradise, so, while he likes Christianity a lot, he criticizes it for its ideas that salvation cannot be achieved through works, and Paradise is reserved for the afterlife; thus, he misses the entire point of Christianity and distorts all the scripture he won't stop harping on.

• Lots and lots of talk about gender. While I don't disagree with all of his thoughts, I do disagree with some, and I honestly don't know why he included any of them in the book. Peterson is VERY in love with manly toughness, and not being a sensitive pansy with feelings. Almost every mention of women is in the context of their all-important role as wife/mother/choosy sexual partner who bestows access to her reproductive system only to the most dominant of the hordes of slavishly begging men. (Peterson is not an incel, but boy you can see why the incels would listen to him.)

• One chapter about taking responsibility instead of blaming others tries to exhort you to fix your own failings because they're the only things under your control, but the hypothetical stories he tells verge on victim blaming.

• He says that boys don't compete with girls because they "can't win." A girl can win honor by winning against a girl, and double honor winning against a boy, but a boy can win honor only by winning against boys. This may be true in the example he uses: a physical fistfight. How is this true, though, when a girl and a boy play wall ball on the playground? He says this to explain, apparently, the reasons why it is natural and normal that girls are socially allowed to cross over into "boy" things, but boys aren't allowed the reverse.

All of these tangents pop up like raisins in an otherwise delicious cookie. Most of them make you wonder why we are even talking about them. To me, the biggest sin of the book is not the sometimes weird, suspect, or cringey things that are sometimes included. Instead, it's the fact that they were included at all, when 99% of them are ABSOLUTELY IRRELEVANT.

I'm not even joking, Peterson goes over the first several chapters of Genesis in detail like five times. And I still DON'T EVEN KNOW WHY. I have no problem with Genesis, but it's so repetitive. He hammers you with The Gulag Archipelago in almost every chapter too, and his constant talk about Stalin and Hitler feels canned after the first several chapters. It's almost like he meant every chapter to be read as a separate essay, because then it wouldn't seem like he's repeating himself over and over and has nothing new to say.

The good advice is there, mostly straightforward. Then he veers and starts hitting you with "the snake in the Garden of Eden is a metaphor for the element of chaos present even in the most perfect place," and "Eve shames Adam the same way women spurn men and make them resentful even today." His symbolic interpretations seem based on nothing and are hard to believe in -- and he does this with everything, even Disney movies. All this, and we still don't even know why he brought up Adam and Eve in almost every chapter in the first place.

There is so much empty philosophy and unsubstantiated social theory crammed in every corner of every chapter, and it was extremely difficult for me to follow how all of it was connected to the actual life advice. This is the biggest issue with this book. It's distended far past the healthy structure it should have had. It's collapsing under its own weight.

Peterson needed a middle school writing teacher to put big red question marks by paragraphs and write "HOW DOES THIS SUPPORT THE THESIS?" Really, it's no surprise that his hobby is writing answers on Quora, that hallowed ground of the IQ obsessive. The list of 12 rules might have made it to print, but the rest of this book should have stayed on Quora.