There’s something nobody told you — or they did, but wrapped in so much noise that you didn’t hear it.
Rules don’t exist.
Not the way they were presented to you. Not as truths. Not as natural laws. Not as the entry fee for being a decent person.
They exist as meanings. As perspectives. As agreements someone made before you were born that were passed from hand to hand until they reached you wearing the costume of the inevitable.
The dumbest rules that exist
You have to go to university. You have to get married. You have to have kids. You have to have a stable career. You have to be polite. You have to respect your elders. You have to work late if the boss needs it. You have to take care of your parents. You have to be normal.
Notice. Every one of those sentences starts with “you have to.”
And that “you have to” is the mechanism. That’s where the manipulation happens. Because when someone wants you to do something and doesn’t want to own that they want it, they call it an obligation. They turn their desire into your law.
Derek Sivers wrote about this surgically. When someone says you have to, what they’re actually doing is elevating the legitimacy of their request. They’re saying: my desires are your laws. You must obey. But if they didn’t want you to do it, the sentence would be different — don’t worry about it.
The obligation isn’t real. It’s a frame. It’s a word choice that removes your ability to decide.
It’s always cultural. Always.
Go to Japan. There are rules that seem absolutely rigid and unquestionable — hierarchy, silence on the subway, formality in professional relationships, shame as a social mechanism. They’re truths.
Arrive in Portugal. They’re not.
Go to Singapore. Chewing gum in the street is illegal. A state rule. An actual law. Arrive in most countries in the world — it’s a joke.
What does this tell you? That the rule is not the truth. It’s context. It’s culture. It’s the collective agreement of a group of people who needed a way to organise themselves — and who over time confused the agreement with the nature of things.
No rule survives the test of universality. None. And what is not universal is not truth. It’s opinion with borrowed authority.
Do What You Can’t.
There’s a video by Casey Neistat with that title. It always made sense to me — more than I could explain at the time.
Today I know why. I have a tendency toward contrariness. Not out of teenage rebellion, not to impress anyone. It’s almost instinctive. When someone tells me I can’t, something in me wakes up.
And what I’ve learned is that this instinct isn’t a flaw. It’s a compass.
Because the things that mattered most — the ones that changed industries, that created culture, that left a mark — were precisely the ones that broke the rule. Punk. The iPhone. Psychoanalysis. Mass printing. The internet. Hip-hop. None of them were well-behaved. None of them asked permission.
Doing what you can’t do forces you out of your comfort zone — that’s the minimum, everyone knows that. But there’s more. Purpose is born from danger. Meaning comes from risk. Identity is built in confrontation, not in conformity.
When you put yourself on the line, when you press the bruise, when you decide that the no is the starting point — that’s when you start discovering who you actually are.
So what are rules, really?
Collective meanings that became habit.
Ways someone found to manage chaos — that worked well enough to repeat themselves.
Social contracts that nobody read but everyone signed.
They can be useful. They can be destructive. But they are not truth.
The only question worth asking when you encounter a rule is this: does it serve me? Or am I serving it?
If you’re serving it without questioning — you’re not disciplined. You’re docile.
And docile is not a virtue. It’s the absence of thought.
Rules don’t exist the way you were told.
They exist as meanings.
And meanings can be questioned, reinterpreted, discarded.
What cannot be done is pretend they are nature when they are merely custom.
That confusion has a cost.
And you’re the one paying it.