Life has rules, and the rules of life—your life—are not necessarily those rules and regulations which are most obvious. Some are hidden; others appear to be of little consequence, and to complicate matters more, they are not the same for everyone. But these are not the only problems with rules, nor are they the greatest. The main problem arises when we make the rules a moral issue, when we make it right to obey the rules and wrong to disobey them. Over the years this has created a huge amount of mischief and misery in people’s lives. If you want to enslave a group of people, all you need do is present them with a set of rules and convince them they are morally wrong if they don’t obey them.
For the most part, you and I have made the rules in our lives a moral issue. Why do we do this? I don’t know. Man has been doing it for thousands of years. But that doesn’t mean we must continue doing it. Try this on. Begin to think of the rules of life in terms of workability and unworkability, rather than in terms of right and wrong. The result will be that breaking a rule is no longer wrong; it simply has a consequence, and you don’t have to obey a rule if you are willing to deal with the consequence. Obviously some consequences are not something you want to deal with. For instance the consequence of you killing your neighbor would most likely be life in the penitentiary. But is it wrong? I don’t know. For a samurai in sixteenth century Japan, to whom honor was everything (in theory at least), killing had a whole other meaning than it does for us.
An example of greater relevance to you and me are the consequences of tax evasion. They are a lot less concrete than the consequences of murder. For instance, if you take a few excess deductions and then get challenged, or even if you fail to file a return, you will have to pay a fine and some interest, but that is all. On the other hand, if you file a bogus return and get caught, you may very well go to prison.
And there is the sleep problem as well. Worrying about getting caught is a consequence. And the worry may not be immediately obvious. You know—break a little rule here and another one there, without being responsible for the fact that there are consequences, and by and by you will start looking and acting like someone who has something to hide. Your life is no longer yours.
What is the practical point of this discussion? This. For most of us, we have a lot of useless and even counterproductive rules in our lives. We break them all the time, and then feel guilty about breaking them. If you shift rules from being a moral issue to being a practical issue, then you won’t experience the pain of guilt if you break them. You still have to deal with the consequences. If you’re not willing to deal with the consequence, don’t break the rule.