Content Warning: This part of the guide contains descriptions of mental illness and traumatic events relayed to the author from his patients. 

In February 2020, the author woke up in an intensive care unit in Moscow, with no memory of why he was there. He could only vaguely remember having been working on a book. In the previous year, both his wife and daughter had undergone surgeries—his wife for kidney cancer, his daughter for issues related to an artificial ankle implanted a decade earlier—and then he began to suffer from extreme anxiety, sleep disorders, and negative reactions to the drugs used to treat those ailments. His daughter and son-in-law took him to Moscow for experimental treatments not used in the West, which only seemed to make things worse. During this time, his wife was profoundly ill, and these extreme conditions “provided me with both a reason to live and a means of testing the viability of the thoughts with which I wrestled” (xxii). 

In his previous book, Peterson described the sources of strength that a person can draw upon to manage the chaos of life and to impose meaning upon it. Whereas Peterson’s previous focus was on making order out of chaos, life itself cannot simply be orderly, and “neither the state of order nor the state of chaos is preferable, intrinsically, to the other” (xxv).