Life Is Complicated, Here're 30 "Unwritten Rules" That People Shared To Make It A Bit Clearer

To gain more insight on the topic of life’s unspoken rules, we reached out to Jeff Leitner, founder of Unwritten Labs, which studied unwritten rules from 2018 to 2021. First, we were curious how Jeff defines unwritten rules and where his fascination for them came from. “There are two ways to explain what unwritten rules are — the technical, wonky way and the easy-to-understand way,” he told Bored Panda. “The wonky way is this: Unwritten rules are powerful, informal suggestions about how we should behave and what we should do to succeed in social environments.”

“The friendlier version is this: Unwritten rules are the ways we know we’re supposed to behave when we’re with other people, so they don’t give us dirty looks or stop being friends with us,” Jeff explained. “In families, unwritten rules are things like ‘Don’t air our personal business with outsiders’ or ‘Always defend your siblings.’ With friends, unwritten rules are things like ‘We don’t date each other’s exes’ or ‘We stop each other from doing stupid things.’ At work, unwritten rules are directives like ‘Don’t leave the office if your team is on a deadline’ or ‘Always defer to colleagues with more seniority.’”

“I got interested in unwritten rules when a colleague and I were trying to figure out how to solve big social problems, like hunger and homelessness,” Jeff shared. “We saw that our society has everything it needs to solve those problems, but that social norms (which are unwritten rules at scale) were getting in the way. After that, I got interested in a few related ideas, like how all organizations actually run on unwritten rules.”

We were also curious if Jeff agrees with many unwritten rules or if he thinks we should view them critically and question them. “As weird as they can be, unwritten rules actually keep our organizations, families, and societies together,” he noted. “Think about it — when was the last time you read the employee handbook at work? Maybe when you first started, if your company even has an employee handbook? No, you know how to behave at work — who to be nice to, who to avoid, how to do your work — based on hundreds of unwritten rules you picked up by watching your colleagues.”

“Now that isn’t to say that there aren’t unwritten rules that get in our way," Jeff added. "We’ve all done stupid things because of peer pressure, which is essentially unwritten rules on steroids."

“As for questioning unwritten rules, good luck with that,” Jeff told Bored Panda. “Most of the time, we’re following them unconsciously. We’re so accustomed to watching everybody for social cues and then doing what they do that we’re generally unaware we’re doing it — hundreds of times a day. And research has shown that we don’t like the idea that we’re responding to social pressure and unwritten rules. We’d rather believe that we’re strong-minded individualists — even if we’re really not.”

When it comes to unwritten rules Jeff considers beneficial, he shared that he likes rules that tell us not to “punch down”, or pick on people who have less power than us. “If you think about it, there aren’t really written rules that prohibit bullying. We count on unwritten rules to tell people not to do it,” he explained. 

“I don’t like the unwritten rules that tell us to ‘stay in your lane’,” Jeff added. “I think we defer way too much to so-called experts, who just keep doing things the way they were taught to do them. If we could somehow get rid of those unwritten rules, I suspect we could spark a lot of new ideas and solve a bunch more problems.”

Jeff also touched on how the unwritten rules in a workplace might not be clear to everyone. He noted that it’s common for, within a company, an employer to not know the unwritten rules of their employees. “There are a couple of reasons for that. One, the unwritten rules don’t really apply to them,” he explained. “Bosses tend not to be as vulnerable to having fellow employees irritated with them. Two, some of the unwritten rules actually function as tips on how to work around the boss — how to stay on their good side, how to get the best projects, or how to get promoted.”

So how much power do life’s unwritten rules wield? “In short, unwritten rules are crazy, crazy powerful,” Jeff says. “Unwritten rules — the ones we’re aware of and the many, many ones we’re not aware of — have much more to do with how we behave than anything else. They are more powerful than written rules, our individual instincts, and our horoscope.”

“We’ve been wired to process unwritten rules for at least 200,000 years, long before we invented language. And while getting kicked out of the tribe isn’t fatal like it was back then, our biology and psychology still take unwritten rules really, really seriously.”

If you’d like to learn more about Jeff’s Unwritten Labs project, be sure to visit its website right here. And then if you’d like to learn more about Jeff's other work and read some of his writing, you can find his website right here.

Sometimes, it feels like life would be so much simpler if everything was just spelled out for us. And while that might become incredibly boring over time, we can experience a little bit of it right here for the next few minutes, by reading through this collection of life’s unspoken rules. Keep upvoting the rules you agree with and try to abide by yourself, and feel free to share any more rules for a better life in the comments below. Then if you’d like to dive even deeper into life’s unspoken rules, you can find another Bored Panda article on the same topic right here!