Influencer rules

I like rules. Well, some of the time. I don’t like to think I’m a mindless conformist, but if someone has laid out the rules explicitly, then at least you know on which side of them you stand.

I like rules that express systems, like the Highway Code. “Honestly,” I thought to myself daily when I was a courier, “if everyone just stopped ignoring (or wilfully breaking) the rules of the road, this whole city would run like clockwork, and we’d all be so much happier.”

And I quite often make private rules for myself, to help my life run more smoothly and safely, and to hold me to my principles when things get complicated.

I’ve followed various rules over my two decades of writing on the internet.1 Sometimes they’re explicit; other times I just have a vague sense that there’s a line I won’t be crossing.

Here are some of my current ones: