1. Let go of cleverness. Be uncomplicated, open, and as honest as possible.
2. Try not to judge others. You will never fully understand who they are and why they do what they do. Accept them at face value. This does not mean you have to let people harm or take advantage of you. And know that passing judgment is also natural and useful. Just try to avoid it when you can and do it with understanding and perspicacity when you can’t. In other words, live and let live.
3. Make yourself vulnerable and risk being hurt in order to experience life more vividly. Sometimes this means sacrificing a lesser good for something greater, like deliberately doing something self-destructive in order to attain a higher degree of self-consciousness. This demands a certain degree of wisdom, insight, and restraint, but practicing it also increases those things.
4. Accept yourself. Self-acceptance comes before self-improvement.
5. You can’t always get what you want, but not getting what you want helps you clarify your desires. And desire is synonymous with life. You will never get free of it. So learn to enjoy wanting what you don’t have yet and don’t judge yourself. You can choose eustress over distress in most situations.
6. Be here now. The here and now is a beautiful miracle. If you can’t see that, it’s because you’ve been walking around in an artificial dream.
7. Try to numb yourself less. All experience is somehow mediated by perceptual filters, but try to live with as much “high definition” as possible. Experiment with being “straight edge” (i.e. no drugs and alcohol). Go on media fasts. Drop out of consensus culture for a while. Risk the scorn of those who cannot seem to do the same.
8. Anger is a gift. Use it to accomplish the other things on this list. Don’t use it to further the distortions of your ego. Knowing the difference comes with experience and life’s greatest teacher, pain. Joy is anger’s sister. They follow each other closely.
9. Learn to think like a poet and engage in acts and personal rituals of symbolic and aesthetic value. This could be anything from drawing a tree in your notebook to going to karaoke with your friends to attending an all-night shamanic drum session with some local, purple-clad group. It doesn’t matter how and with whom you do it. All that matters is its meaning to you personally. Art, music, writing, spirituality, and other forms of creative expression all count for this.
10. Read everything all the time. Don’t get sucked in or repulsed by book marketing. Read great art and great trash. Just read. This underlies and informs everything else on this list.