The Son of Peter, the prophet from the far side of the Jordan

The Son of Peter, the prophet from the far side of the Jordan, in the Land of the Maple Leaf Tribe, was in town, and Cone Man paid $147 to attend his lecture, hoping for pearls of wisdom from this supremely sagacious of sages (or at least that was how he appeared to frustrated middle-aged males like Cone Man). The Son of Peter discoursed for an hour and a half in a rambling, narrative, peripatetic fashion, and rehearsed many of the themes Cone Man had already heard, but there were a few nuggets to justify Cone Man's thirst for wisdom.

The Son of Peter propounded the premise that an essay should begin with a problem that the essay writer is genuinely concerned about. All else flowed from that - if it was not a problem of personal importance to the writer, their essay would bore them, their readers, and particularly the luckless sages who reviewed their essays in the countless great halls of wisdom dotting the world. The Son of Peter said many other wise things, but this piece literary methodological advice lodged in Cone Man's mighty cerebrum.

The simplicity of it was awe-inspiring. Cone Man merely had to consider one vexatious problem a day, ponder it, and then write a one page essay about it. Cone Man did not have to know the answer, he merely had to identify and articulate the problem, and if no solution presented itself, he could end with a question and move on.

Happily, sadly, problems abounded. The question was which problems to write about. There already many pretentious prophets writing about world peace and global warming. Narcissistic prophets on the other hand, laboured under the different delusion that others wanted some kind of public confessional about their trivial personal neuroses. Cone Man resolved that he would restrict his prophecies to problems generic to the common warrior, which he had personally experienced.

Cone Man's current generic problem was Paralysis by Analysis. Toxic circularity was the crux of the problem: Cone Man pondered the Sea of Troubles confronting him, then pathetically sat in his man cave, drinking coffee and watching You Tube videos while passively suffering the slings and arrows of misfortune. Unsurprisingly, the Sea of Troubles, being unopposed, merely lapped ever more menacingly around Cone Man's heels, whereupon Cone Man continued to ponder the impossibility of taking up arms against the Sea of Troubles.

The solution, of course, was to substitute continuous action for interminable angst. "Where should I start?" Cone Man wondered. "Clean up your room" growled the Son of Peter. (SEE Peterson, 2018)

Peterson, J.B. (2018). Rule 6: Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. In 12 rules for life: An antidote to chaos (pp. 147-159). United Kingdom: Allen Lane.