How I learned to stop worrying and love the rules

Life is a seemingly never-ending (until it abruptly does) process where complications pile up higher and higher on top of each other with each step. Like Sisyphus or perhaps a cosmic game of Whack-a-Mole, one must forever chase after these complications putting out fires that each complication inevitably starts, to prevent the fires from spreading to other complications that they sit upon, and when one fire is extinguished race to the next one and deal with the stresses that it has introduced. The less time you spend dealing with complications and the complications that your existing complications cause, ad infinitum, the better one can live. But since the complications grow larger and continue materializing throughout life, by definition it is impossible to catch up and the time you spend dealing with them inevitably goes up.

One of the primary purposes of life, therefore, is obviously to keep your rate of complication materialization as low as possible and keep your fire fighting efficiency as high as possible. For example, to succeed with the first goal, it would be best to stay out of any industry that is advancing quickly (e.g. would require you to continually update your "skill set") or that involves anything that has a tendency to break for inexplicable reasons. For example, if you perform action A on day N and it results in output O, and then you again perform action A on day N+1 though now it results in output O' where O != O', then you are doing a bad job at keeping your rate of complication materialization low. The most obvious example of this mistake is having anything to do with computers. Bad, bad, bad idea (unfortunately it's harder and harder to avoid this kind of job nowadays -- that is, one where you work with computers -- but no one said living the good life would be easy).

To succeed with the second goal -- keeping your fire fighting efficiency with respect to your life's complications high -- it suffices to learn the details of these complications (taxes, contracts, strange rules, insurances, regulations, etc.) and make sure that you avoid activities that would complicate them further. For example, if understanding contracts for borrowing large amounts of money is already complicated (it is), then under no circumstances should you do so in a foreign language or sign said contracts while intoxicated. Don't do things like buy property, have children, or get a job. If you have to do any of those things for some reason (e.g. you don't want to live the good life), then definitely don't do any of them somewhere where you don't understand the language, or where the culture is such that the people enjoy an inordinate number of dense, complex, multi-self-referential sets of indecipherable rules to regulate their days.

That would just be silly.