Posted: 2025-12-23
Jordan Peterson, the alt-right darling, wrote a book called 12 Rules For Life, and rule number one was "stand up straight with your shoulders back."
This rule is, in fact, a really perfect and ironic distillation of what is wrong with this ideological leaning.
How Peterson Meant It
"To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order. It means adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability, and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise of childhood, where finitude and mortality are only dimly comprehended. It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality (it means acting to please God, in the ancient language).""So, attend carefully to your posture. Quit drooping and hunching around. Speak your mind. Put your desires forward, as if you had a right to them—at least the same right as others. Walk tall and gaze forthrightly ahead. Dare to be dangerous. Encourage the serotonin to flow plentifully through the neural pathways desperate for its calming influence."
Okay, let's roll with the metaphor.
How To Actually Stand Up Straight With Your Shoulders Back
The thing is. If you actually try to permanently change your posture simply through sheer force of will, you'll find that it is pushing shit uphill. It is not impossible to do it this way, but the success rate is incredibly poor.
What does it actually take to achieve this?
First up, you need to figure this process out without falling for alternative health nonsense and easy-quick-fix gadgets. This already requires a certain amount of executive function, which continues for the whole process.
Next, you'll need a certain baseline of physical and mental health. If you have a spinal issue then it may be a non-starter, and you're going to need consistent dedicated effort which will be very difficult if you have an unstable, undiagnosed or untreated mental health condition. And the process can involve injuries, so even if your health is fine now, you're definitely going to need access to decent medical care as a bare minimum.
Your basic circumstances are going to need to be stable. If your housing, income or core relationships can't be relied upon, then you have much bigger problems which need to be addressed first.
You're going to need to spend time with a dedicated personal trainer. You're going to need to live near a competent one, for a start. The regimen is likely going to involve strengthening your posterior chain and relearning how to use your body, which is going to take a reasonable amount of spare time and money. You're probably going to have to be able to commit to weekly sessions, so if you are working a casual job with irregular hours this is going to be very difficult.
Many personal trainers are, quite frankly, scammers. So you'll need to navigate that — finding a good one and preventing the bad ones from taking advantage of you. Social connections will likely matter. The process will likely be counter-productive if you have a substance use problem, too.
You are going to have to be able to enter a very male space full of people who are much fitter than you. This is both a challenge to body image and many forms of trauma, and is also likely to be extremely difficult for many trans people.
Sometimes you're going to come back from the gym completely exhausted. So you're going to need to have the wiggle room to not be functioning at 100% every single day. You're probably going to have to work on your diet, too, which will also cost additional time and money.
So: background knowledge, street smarts, the executive functioning to continue commitments, lack of substance use problems, physical health, mental health, access to medical care, social connections, stable housing, stable income, stable relationships, stable schedule, living in a sufficiently central and gentrified location, a minimum standard of body image, absence of certain forms of trauma, a gender identity that fits neatly into subculture norms (or the willingness to stand out), spare time, spare money, and functional wiggle room.
That is what it takes to "stand up straight with your shoulders back."
Is Peterson's general philosophy implicitly predicated on taking these things for granted?
If the world wants people to stand up straight, it has to stop breaking their spines.
Checkin
Version: 1
Written: 2025-12-23
Written on: 7.5mg olanzapine since 2025-11-11 - likely causing significant cognitive impairment
Mental health was: fair - estimate 30% brain