I believe in following rules. That may make me, a 22-year-old college student sound boring but by the end of this essay, I think you will see my point.
I first really realized I had this belief while sitting in a smelly locker room. My soccer team and I were getting yelled at for half an hour because one of my teammates broke one of the team’s rules. This is not exactly what I’d call a fun afternoon and I would have very much liked to use that time differently. Annoyed, I thought, “How hard is it to follow one simple rule?!”
No matter if it’s drinking alcohol during a “dry-season” or soccer balls being stolen because somebody didn’t lock up the equipment shed, 99% of the things my team gets reprimanded for are 100% avoidable if everybody had just followed the few simple rules that were put in place to regulate the team and its performance.
This not only applies to sports teams, but also to other social group settings such as school classes, the workforce of a company, or groups as small as three siblings. In these group settings, rules are designed to enable the successful coexistence and cooperation of its members.
An unfortunate side effect of being in a group is that all members often become partially responsible for everybody else’s actions. If one doesn’t follow the rules, suddenly all members are seen as rule breakers and pulled in for a “come-to-Jesus” meeting, as a friend of mine calls the rather intense sessions of reprimand brought upon us by the coaches. The meetings hold the purpose of general and specific deterrence, yet, in my experience, they only ever seem to have the desired effect on those who already follow the rules. The rule-breakers tend to stay exactly that.
What they don’t realize is that the result of their behavior is negative tension brewing within the team. This tension builds up over time and turns into the uncomfortable situations that I and my team find ourselves confronted with on a regular basis. The frustrating part is that most of the drama could have been avoided if everybody adhered to the guidelines.
Overall, my personal philosophy for daily life and especially social settings is to not make life harder for other people. Most people just want to live their life as annoyance-free as possible. I think everybody being mindful of the basic rules of group settings would achieve exactly that.
In the end, I want to mention that I do recognize the need for exceptions. Some rules are simply not reasonable, for example, because they discriminate against some members of the group.
Rules like that are meant to be broken. Please do.