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People Love to Tell Others How to Live. Why?

Stephen
2 min readJan 21, 2024

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Answer: To shape surrounding behaviour to mirror their ideals

People love to tell others how to live because nothing is more satisfying than shaping surrounding behaviour to mirror one's ideal. This ideal is often anchored in a series of strongly-held conclusions about how the world should run, and importantly — certainly annoyingly — about how one should run their life. Furthermore, these conclusions are not necessarily informed by ignorance; on the contrary: on the one hand, some conclusions are often informed by empirically sourced data, which aims to address uncertainties and solve problems; so they have a defacto factual outlook, for example, evolving knowledge swimming in from fields of science and social sciences. However, on the other hand, some of these conclusions are informed by just theoretically sourced data, for example, theories swimming in from the scientific community around the origin of the universe, and other theories from philosophy and theology.

Now, it is not these conclusions that I find intriguing, but it is the purpose with which the said people desire to compel their surroundings to mirror their ideals. I have stated at the start of this piece that the desire to tell others how to live centres around the satisfaction of shaping surrounding behaviour to mirror their ideals, but why do said people want their…

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